How to create an image that looks like free-motion quilting
 

The header for the Quilting Board has a curved line that looks like sewing. I've been trying to figure out how to draw free-motion quilting in a graphics software package. Some allow straight lines to be converted easily to dashes that look like sewing. Photoshop allows you to manually set the angle of a line, but this is not easy when trying to do a free-motion quilt design in an image.

Any recommendations for software that you can use to draw free-motion quilting designs that look like sewing ?

SewCalGal

that is a great question

I have no idea, I don't use any kind of software like that.

If you are using Windows -- there is an applet that is part of Windows called Paint. You can use a pencil and doodle any way you want -- it also has some shapes. It is also a good way to do those practices to get the brain in sync with how you want to quilt.

I haven't figured it out yet either, and will be watching for others' suggestions. I suspect it's possible in Illustrator, but I don't know it well enough to figure it out yet.

You can even do it with Word.

Nice, but how do you do that?

Adobe Illustrator could do it, but it's not cheap (extremely not cheap) and not intuitive. In other words, you'd have to REALLY want to do this drawing to buy Illustrator for it.

Wendy, I know Illustrator. You draw the line the same way you draw any line, and then you can make it a dashed line in the Stroke dialog box.

I'm using Word 2007. Insert/Shapes/(pick one - I picked a curve but any would work). This brings up the drawing tools screen, and you can then pick format/shape outline/dashes, and select which style of dashes you want.