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Loading your freshly made cross-stitch pattern to Pattern Keeper

So now that you have created your pattern on PC Stitch and saved it both on the PC Stitch and as a PDF. Now what?

 

Well you can print it off so that you can have a physical copy to work off of. This is great for patterns that are not a really big pattern. I would say no bigger than 10 pages with the legend would be the that I would print because of the cost of paper and printer ink at home. I am not sure how much the cost would be for taking your pattern to your local library or office supply store to print your pattern.

 

With the physical pattern you can put it with the project if you need to take a break from it for some reason. The down side of this is you could loose a page of the pattern and you have deleted the PDF from your computer.

 

In the Google play store there are some applications that you can import your PDF to and work off of it. The one that I have experience with and so far I like is the Pattern Keeper. It did take me a bit to figure it out. But once I figured it out for the importing a PDF of a pattern that I had created from PC Stitch.

 

If you look at the previous post about creating your pattern. The only extra step that you will need to do when you are making your pattern you need to change the symbol font from the default of PC Stitch 3 to PC Stitch 2. With this change your pattern and legend will import with no problem.

 

Steps to change the symbols on PC Stitch 11:

  1. Open up PC Stitch 11
  2. Don’t do a new pattern. Just close the pop up window.
  3. Under the home tab you should see a couple of icons highlighted.
  4. Click on the icon that says Options
  5. In the next pop up click on the Pallet Options.
  6. Click on the icon that is at the end of the box for “The Default Symbol Font”
  7. Scroll up till you see the selection for PC Stitch 2. Highlight this font.
  8. Click OK button.

 

By following the steps above your pattern will import with no problem to Pattern Keeper application. Plus by changing the default you wont have to change it in each pattern or have to manually input the colors for the legend on Pattern Keeper. Oh one more thing about Pattern Keeper, it does cost a one time fee. If you do change devices as long as you have an Android device you will always be able to recover the application and any patterns that you may have stored in the application.

 

Let’s dive into the nitty gritty of importing to Pattern Keeper.

  1. Open up the Pattern Keeper application.
  2. Tap the “+”
  3. Tap the advanced options and tic the boxes for show all steps and keep all possible symbols.
  4. Tap the open PDF
  5. Scroll through your files till you find the pattern.
  6. Tap on the pattern. Pattern Keeper will start parsing all of the pages in the PDF file.
  7. Next it will ask you to check through and make sure that the grids are OK before clicking OK.
  8. Tap OK once you have looked at the pages. Next it will say reading x number of pages.
  9. If you had changed the default PC Stitch symbol font all your colors should be imported as well. If not you will have to do it yourself.

 

By looking at the number of steps it looks like they would take a really long time to import. In all reality it only takes about 5 minutes including the time it takes for the parsing and reading of the pattern. Pattern Keeper can be used with any digital pattern. The information in the application store says only by recognized pattern designers. But I have tried with unrecognized designers and had no problem with importing the pattern to Pattern Keeper.

 

The developers of Pattern Keeper are still experimenting with taking a photo or scan of a pattern and importing for that photo. So I haven’t played around with that part until they get all of the bugs worked out of it.

 

I really hope that this helps you in creating your own pattern and importing it to Pattern Keeper. The cost of both the Pattern Keeper application and PC Stich11 is fairly reasonable. It can be found on Amazon. You will get a disk and can put it on pretty much any pc that you have as long as it has a CD drive or a portable CD drive. Unfortunately at this time that I know of PC Stitch 11 is not Mac compatible.

 

Happy stitching and see you next time.

Making of a Cross-Stitch Pattern

How do you make your own cross-stitch pattern and use it on Pattern Keeper?

 

Well I had been wondering the same thing myself. Until I had an ah ha moment. So let me explain this ah ha moment. Actually there were many ah ha moments as you will see.

 

I had been wanting to cross-stitch a picture that a friend of mine from a mobile game that we both played on. She was an older gal that has passed away I believe as I cant get in touch with her in game and on chat app for game players. I figured I could still do this one picture of hers. It has been my testing picture. It had been through many revisions with a pattern conversion programs. With working with her picture the original picture was never damaged with importing to a pattern maker program.

 

Lately I had been working with PC Stitch 11 Pro. I was able to do the editing and sizing with no problem. But I was still having issues on how to print, save, and share. It turned out to be really large as far how many pages of paper it needed to be printed up. So this set me off to finding a way to have it in a digital form. This lead to even more of a few more headaches.

 

I turned to the internet but nothing was ever clear on how to do this. I had to piece every thing together and a lot of trial and error. The first thing that I learned was that with saving as a .PAT it can’t be printed or shared. The next clue that I found was that I needed to save it as a .PDF. With that there was all kinds of recommendations for PDF programs. But after much frustration I found that not to be true. To save it as a .PDF I needed to be in the print screen and have the printer changed from our normal printer to print to PDF. But also need to have the box checked to print to file. That was the ah ha moment.

 

The next ah ha moment was how to share it and have it be able to import a pattern into a digital form. With more trial and error and emailing it to myself so I could get it on my cellphone and use Pattern Keeper. At first I wasn’t able to get the pattern imported correctly. Then when I finally got a pattern to import, but the threads wouldn’t load on their own and the symbols weren’t liked. All the thread colors had to manually inputted. I had remembered in one clue that I needed to change the symbol font from PC Stitch 3 to PC Stitch 2.  The next headache was the fact that when I imported the picture to PC Stitch11 the default setting was for the PC Stitch 3. So I had to change every symbol in the legend to a PC Stitch 2.  

 

So that you don’t have to go through all of the frustrations that I went through on figuring out how to make your favorite picture into a cross-stitch pattern this is how you do it or if you don’t want to or have the programs and apps to do so I do offer that service for your convenience and you will have to print the pattern and kit it up yourself.

 

Steps to making your own pattern.

  1. Choose your picture.
  2. Open PC Stitch. There will be a pop up for new, open, recently used. Here you will choose new.
  3. Next pop up is pattern properties. This can be adjusted when you import your picture. Click OK.
  4. Scroll over to import/export tab. This is where you will import your picture to  PC Stitch.
  5. Choose where you are getting your picture from. File or camera. Or if you are working on a previous imported picture.
  6. If from a file you click on browse and look in the area of your computer where the file is located. And open the file with this pop up.
  7. The next window is where you do a lot of your work at.
    1. Under the grayed side of the window click the preview. This is where you will start to see all of your adjustments to your picture.
    2. If the picture is pixelated try changing the stitch width to match the pixels of the picture. There is a limit of 999 width stitches. So if the pixels is larger than that you will need to do a cropping.
    3. Now is the time to do the fine tuning of your picture. This is where you will spend a lot of time doing your fine tuning. In the fine tuning you will be choosing what size count you want to work on, clarity of picture with the width of stitch count.
    4. Once you are satisfied with the fine tuning click OK.
  8. Now once the pattern is imported you can do more editing. Under the tools tab you will find a few things that are very helpful in your pattern making. Here you can change the pattern size if you are not happy about the size of it. You can also have the pattern maker mark the center from the top and left side of the  pattern so you don’t have to figure it out.
  9. Once you are all satisfied with the symbols, colors, size, clarity of design now it is time to print it off or save to a PDF file for transfer to your digital pattern application. That is a whole subset of instructions, but once you have done it a time or two it will be easy and quick.

 

Printing of your pattern:

  1. Open up the print screen.
  2. Switch to PDF. I use the Microsoft Print to PDF for the printer selection.  Here you can give it a name if you haven’t already when you first opened up the PC Stitch.
  3. Choose the size of 6 for each page to be only pattern and no legend on one side of the page.
  4. Under the information tab of the print screen choose everything that you want to be printed on the information page(s).
  5. Then click print to print to paper.

 

If you are printing to digital you follow above instructions except you do a little more between steps 2 and 3. Next to the box where it says Microsoft Print to PDF there is a raised button that says Printer Set up. Click on that button and check the Print to File. Then OK. Then down at the bottom click on Print. This will save your pattern to a PDF that you will be able to upload to a pattern keeper application for you.

 

But you will still want to save your newly created pattern with the PC Stitch extension of .PAT. That is done with the disk icon in the upper left corner of the PC Stitch program. I highly recommend this saving if you have to come back and change something on your created pattern.

 

There you go on how to create your own pattern with PC Stitch 11.

 

Happy stitching.