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What a fun question Janet! Actually, with Strawberry Fields, Winter Into Spring, Cupid's Garden and Glad Shamrocks, those were designed completely in PatternMaker without any sketches. Just stitch by stitch. Although when I did the rose in Glad Shamrocks, I worked from a photo of a real rose. On those types of designs, I usually start with the part I'm sure of and then work up the other parts based on what I've already done. Eventually, they all come together.

With Garden Jewels, I did a very rough sketch first just for placement purposes really. The only thing I had a little trouble with was the watermelon because I wanted it to look like a real slice of watermelon! So that took a bit of research, finding some photos of real watermelon slices to see what the shading would look like.

Many of my designs are worked with out sketches. With my cat designs, I usually work from photos of real cats, many of my flowers are worked from photos too and the same goes for my birds.

I usually work in layers. For Garden Jewels, I did the watermelon first, added the other fruits and then the daisies. Then I added the hummingbirds and after that, it seemed to need a border so I put that in. Voila! A very colorful design!

With PatternMaker, I can view the whole design at once no matter how big it is. I just have to reduce it to 25% of the actual size and then I can see how it all looks together.

Does that help Janet?

Pam