Stitchboard Admin message #2
Re: Hello everyone! :)
November 3, 2017 at 9:51:30 PM  (in response to SherryBaby message #1)
 
Sherry,

Welcome! (You do know I have that song stuck in my head now! )

I'm sorry to say I'm completely unfamiliar with Jody Pyott patterns; I've seen them made up, but have never owned any of the patterns or made one. Are the sections all square? Are they single crochet with bobble areas of the same size, or are they some other stitch that turns out square, along with bobbles that fit into a basic square?

Have you reached out to the woman who made the piece in the pic to see what she did to center the names? Do the patterns come with an alphabet for customization, or are you on your own with creating them?

Is the designer responsive to questions about how to center names in her patterns?

If there's no alphabet included, could you use graph paper to make a basic alphabet that's the same height as the inside of the sections for the names? If there is one, can you make a simple representation of the letters with graph paper, using outlines to keep your letters from going out of the lines?

If everything is square, whether or not there's an alphabet for customization, I think graph paper would be the key to everything, because then you can use a pencil to try different placements of letters and erase when your spacing looks too close or too far apart, until you have it just right.

Wish I were familiar with these patterns so I could know what I'm talking about!

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Stitchboard Admin message #4
Re: Hello everyone! :)
November 5, 2017 at 1:42:39 AM  (in response to SherryBaby message #3)
 
Sherry,

You're right, it's not too bad of a song. LOL, but it's still stuck in my head!

Okay, I would say the first thing would be to perhaps work out a rough alphabet, either from something found free online or roughly sketching one out, knowing how high and how wide of an area you have to work with.

No worries, the graph paper trick is pretty simple! The main thing is to know the size of your outlines. That's really the best way to do it.

Also, are the bobbles rectangular or square? Not that it entirely matters because you'll just be doing simple letters, but the tricky part is if the bobbles are square, because single crochet stitches are definitely rectangular.

I'm not sure looking at part of a pattern would be helpful in this case, though I thank you for the offer. All it will tell me is how the designer's graphs look, but it doesn't tell me the shape of the bobbles from right up close.

My guess is you're looking for something far simpler than the freePatternWizard can realistically create. If you were looking for fancy letters, fine, but you're looking for letters to fit into a very limited size. Aside from the fact that the current version of the software doesn't allow you to set the height (rows), only the width (stitches), you'd have to do a lot of experimenting to get the length correct (this will be fixed in a later build of the software, which is in development at the moment). And again, I do think the freePatternWizard is overkill for this. Using graph paper will allow you to not only graph an alpahbet, or at least the letters you'll need, but you only need the simplest shapes. In looking at the picture above, I'm struck by how simple the letters are in the names. The freePatternWizard will take a font and will tend to take it quite literally, filling in letters in spots to make them 2 or 3 bobbles wide. All you need are single-wide bobbles for each part of a letter.

If you'd rather use a computer, you could use a graphics program and some digital graph paper, then plot out the letters you need that way.

You could also try a simple cross stitch alphabet, though keep in mind cross stitch is square, not rectangular, so your letters will be shorter and wider.

Hope that helps!

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