Originally Posted by
ladysuds
I also have the same question as Homemother, Can you direct us to a website where it tells you how to use Excel in making quilt patters? Thanks...beautiful quilt , can't wait to see it when it's finished.
I use Excel day-in-day-out at work, so it just comes naturally to me. I won't go into the basics of using Excel, this is just the process I used to lay out my design. If you want to know how to use Excel, I'm sure there are many many tutorials on the internet! I find if I want to do something and don't know how, I just google it!
I set up my row heights and column widths so that my grid was roughly equal sized squares.
I figured out many squares wide and tall my quilt should be (for example, each square represents 2", so I figured out the quilt sized based on that).
I inserted my inspiration image into Excel and scaled it to the right size, and made the background transparent so I could see the grid behind. This was tricky, I had to do some googling, and I don't really remember exactly how I did it now. If you're not basing your quilt on an image, you don't need to worry about this.
I used the fill tool to fill in the cells in different colours to represent different fabrics and blocks.
Once I had the layout ready, I started identifying the squares, figuring out which ones could be combined into blocks. I labeled each square or block with a letter. Then I used the count function to figure out how many of each type of square there was so I could plan my cutting and piecing.
No triangle option in Excel, unfortunately. But I have a terrible time with triangles, so I don't mind!