OK.  I owe everyone an apology here.  I’ve been crazy busy with work lately.  Throw in a dash of travelling, a couple of magazine articles, sewing, writing and, every so often, sleep, and sometimes something slips through the cracks. See, I’ve had this blog post ready for a couple of weeks.  I set it up […]

This is Part 2 of 3 parts of the tutorial for creating multi-coloured smocking plates in Illustrator. You’ll find the first part of the tutorial, including the necessary downloads, here. 19. Fit the image in the window (Ctrl+0) 20. In the layers window, make the “picture” layer invisible. 21. Lock the “images” layer and unlock […]

This is the second tutorial in my on-going series on how to create smocking plates in Illustrator. You’ll be creating a picture smocking plate with multiple colours, irregular shapes and learn how to create basic embroidered details and save them in the symbols library. It builds on the basic skills from the first two-part tutorial, […]

This is part 2 of the first tutorial on how to design smocking plates in Adobe Illustrator. For the first half of this tutorial, including the Dropbox links to the tutorial’s files , a printer-friendly pdf of the complete instructions and step by step screen grabs for the first portion of the of the tutorial, click […]

This tutorial is designed to allow smockers to create their own smocking graphs in Adobe Illustrator. It’s what I use to create the free vintage plates I offer here on my blog, like the one here and which I use to design many of my magazine projects, too. Pretty, no? Why Illustrator? Well, there is […]