Carol Doak Foundation Factory Software
10-25% off Foundation Factory, paper piecing software. Carol Doak Designer edition, Quilts Magazine Designer edition. Review by Sharla Hicks. Greatest Savings in. The Foundation Factory. Imagine printing Carol Doak’s foundation. Here are two ways to deal with the auto run program so that you can install your software.
What makes Carol Doak's Foundation Paper 100 sheets pack for paper piecing different?. It's lightweightwon't create bulk when you join sections. It's absorbentless ink transfer where you don't want it. It's non-coatedfabric won't slip on it. More Styles of Paper Foundation Sheets Carol Doak's Foundation Paper 100 Sheets, 8 1/2' x 11' Size: 8.5' x 11' Count: 100 MFG: C & T Item Code: P01H ISBN / SKU / UPC: 53 Weight: 1.00 lb 10% off: $12.95 MSRP: $ 12.95 Carol Doak's Legal Sized Foundation Paper 50 Sheets, 8 1/2' x 14' Note: Includes Free border pattern Size: 8.5' x 14' Count: 50 MFG: C & T Item Code: P01HLG ISBN / SKU / UPC: 184 Weight: 0.85 lb 10% off: $8.95 MSRP: $ 9.95 Carol Doak's Foundation Paper details. Use in most inkjet or laser printers or copy machines.
No shrinking, curling, or turning brittle!. Holds up beautifully during stitching; tears away easily when you're done. What makes Carol Doak's Foundation Paper different?. It's lightweightwon't create bulk when you join sections. It's absorbentless ink transfer where you don't want it. It's non-coatedfabric won't slip on it and stays in one place.
RE: Legal sized paper makes it easier to create longer quilt border designs. Sampler Package 5 Different Types Blank Foundation Paper Piecing Sheets Each is 8.5' x 11' Try out all our paper piecing products that work with printer, copier or light box. (100 sheets). (100 sheets). (30 sheets). (25 sheets).
(25 sheets) Item Code: P00 Weight: lb 13% Off: $ MSRP: $ Carol Doak Foundation Factory Package. CD: Print paper piecing blocks any size Includes the blocks from the Doak Easy Paper Pieper Series that is now out of print. PAPER:. RULER: Item Code: i02d Weight: lb Our Price: $ MSRP: $. By Brenda Henning Foundation Paper Piecing Software on CD More for EQ: Blocks, Books, Fabrics & Foundation Sheets 25 Sheets.
20% off 11 popular designs + 2 new Spring & Fall Release of Fabric Collections in bitmap format Jenny Haskins & Quilt-Pro's Paper Piecing CDs 95/98/NT/00/ME/XP/7 & MAC Jenny Haskins Perfect Quilt Jenny Haskins From Judi Matheson Both Paper Pieced & Pieced Standard Edition, Vol. 1 Standard Edition, Vol 2 Carol Doak Edition, 5 years of articles, 170 projects Paper Pieced, Pieced & Applique Quilt Design Software Includes: Digitized machine embroidery designs Blocks to design quilt Quilt stencil designs Print to size Fabric Paper piecing.
Two Foundation Piecing Programs Foundation Factory On CD-ROM, For Windows 3.1 and Windows 95, 500+ Blocks, $29.95 Sew Precise! On CD-ROM, for Windows 95 Only, 1100+ Blocks, $29.95 Given the current wild popularity of foundation paper piecing among quilters, it was inevitable that the clever programmers at Quilt-Pro and The Electric Quilt Company would come up with a way to computerize the process. Foundation blocks are already present in their quilt design programs, but these two CD-ROMs take the trend a step further to give us dedicated programs containing hundreds of blocks ready for sizing and printing, along with help files and tutorials for novice paper piecers. Driver pci ven_14e4&dev_4315&subsys_04b514e4&rev_01 version 10.0.
Quilt-Pro was the first out of the starting gate with Foundation Factory, which appeared in 1997. The program requires Windows 3.1 or Windows 95, and installs easily and quickly from the CD-ROM. The entire program installed to a hard drive requires slightly more than ten megabytes of space, but in consideration of those who may have older computers with small drives, the installation routine provides the user the choice of a partial installation with the program running off the CD-ROM. I installed the program on three different computers - a Pentium 166, a 486 laptop, and my old clunker 486-66 desktop - and had no trouble at all.
You are also given a choice at installation to install the blocks into your Quilt-Pro block directory (if you own the program) and/or to load a Quilt-Pro demo program. When you open the program (it doesn't place a shortcut on your desktop, so you have to do that manually), Foundation Factory presents a clean interface made up of 35 category buttons near the top of the screen, a box below that for viewing up to 10 blocks at a time and on the left margin a column with three buttons: Print, Help, and Sewing Info. It's a simple and logical enough screen, but I have two arguments with it. The first is that there is no way to customize it by resizing its elements. The second is that there seems to be a bit of wasted space, with an empty bar along the top and a good bit of empty space on the left side. With a little better planning either the category buttons or the quilt blocks (or both) could have been a little bigger without overcrowding. The categories of blocks (there are more than 500 blocks in all) are relatively conventional, arranged alphabetically from Airplanes to Twists.
There is an alphabet set, and nice selections of such old chestnuts as Log Cabins and Pineapples. Shoo-fly, Ohio Star, Monkey Wrench and other favorites are contained in the logically named 'Traditional Blocks' category, and there is a good collection of cats, other animals, baskets, fans, etc. Also included is a collection of 28 paper-piecable borders.
Each block is displayed in about a 1-inch thumbnail with the block's popular name and filename below it. You select a block either by highlighting it with a left-mouse-click and pressing the 'Print' button, or double-clicking the block, and another screen comes up that contains a view of the paper pattern, a color rendering of the finished block (both about two inches square) along with a menu of options for printing.
These include boxes for selecting the block size you wish, the page margins, and checkboxes for mirroring the block (for iron-ons), printing in grayscale, drawing dashed lines, etc. Also from this nicely-designed page you can select English or metric measurements, change your printer settings, and go to the program's 'Sewing Instructions.' Pressing the 'Sewing Instructions' button takes you to the program's built-in browser, a stripped down, customized interface for reading the hypertext files that walk you through the foundation piecing process. You can customize this interface by substituting your favorite browser, but whichever you use the web-style help files are quite nice and certainly in tune with the current trend toward a single, browser-like interface with our computers. From this view there is a contents bar that takes you with one click to a variety of different types of help, including overall Contents, Help Index, Block Index, How Do I?, Sewing Instructions, and FAQs.
Carol Doak
This button bar is configurable as well, if you want to put some particular page in the help files on it. In their help files the folks at Quilt-Pro assume no prior knowledge of foundation piecing, and very clearly and meticulously walk the user through the definition of the technique, the different parts of the block patterns, and the exact instructions on sewing. There are discussions of the best types of paper to use, the pros and cons of using muslin foundations, and many other issues. After the introduction there is a step-by-step tutorial that goes through the steps in sewing a block, with very good illustrations and with tips on common mistakes and how to correct them. At the end of the tutorial there is further information on making quilts from your blocks and on using these blocks in the Quilt-Pro program to design quilts.
Since the primary purpose of these programs is to create accurate printed patterns, I tested Foundation Factory's ability to print accurate patterns in various sizes and on different printers. Theoretically, the program will print blocks infinitely large in size, but of course it's not often anyone wants a foundation block larger than about six or eight inches. The program defaults on most blocks to a four-inch block, and I printed four-inch, six-inch, and 14-inch patterns on both a Hewlett-Packard laser printer and an Epson Inkjet. On a four-inch pineapple block, the pattern was quite exact at 4 inches. A six-inch pineapple block was approximately 1/16 of an inch shy of the full six inches. On a two-part cat block, the patterns for the two pieces of a six-inch block when added together came a full 1/8 of an inch shy of the requisite length.
While this may not seem like much, over 8 blocks this can make a quilt an inch off. It appears the inaccuracies may increase as block size increases, so it's probably a good idea to measure your patterns before you use them to know exactly what you're dealing with. Blocks can be sized in the program in increments of 1/4 of an inch. Quilt-Pro has recently lowered the price on Foundation Factory from $39.95 to $29.95, and is also promising a Macintosh edition. In addition, a 'Designer Edition' containing 300 blocks from Carol Doak's books, became available on May 27. It is also priced at $29.95.
Is the somewhat later entry of The Electric Quilt Company in this software category. Being second had its disadvantages, but it also had compensations. Whatever Electric Quilt may have lost in early market share, they have used the time to develop an excellent program and they appear to have improved in many ways on Quilt-Pro's version of this product.
The first and most obvious improvement is that Sew Precise! Has more than twice as many blocks in its library, at 1100-plus. The blocks are contained in two collections, 'Old Favorites' and 'New Inspirations.' The first of course contains most of the traditional blocks, including log cabins, pineapples, diamonds in squares, and a variety of stars. The second collection focuses less on pure geometric blocks and more on representational blocks of everything from trains to garden tools, along with a variety of holiday and horticultural subjects.
The main screen contains a 'button' bar across the top using representations of real (sewing) buttons labeled 'Go Online,' 'Print,' 'How To' and 'Help.' On the left margin is a conventional directory tree containing the two major collections along with subcategories of blocks. These can be expanded and contracted, and the tree is used to select the screen full of blocks you wish to appear in the box on the right two-thirds of the screen. One nice aspect of this main screen, besides its efficient use of space, is the fact that you can customize it as you wish. You can move the center bar to the right or left, and can completely eliminate the directory tree if you wish to look at a full screen of blocks.
In addition you can right-click on the block window and be given an array of choices to customize that. You can show two, three, or four rows of blocks (with the blocks adjusting in size accordingly), can choose to see all the blocks as line drawings, in grayscale, or in full color, and can turn on or off a 'Tooltip' feature which displays the name of the block when you move the cursor over it. Sew Precise!' S help and sewing instructions are written in a more conventional Windows Help style rather than in a mini-browser, but this is not a drawback.
The elementary instructions on foundation piecing and the tips and tricks are very well-composed and should help both the novice and experienced piecer in learning and improving their techniques. As in Foundation Factory, there is a separate section on sewing together multi-part blocks. I performed the same printing tests on Sew Precise! And the accuracy of the printed foundation was better than I found in Foundation Factory.
Both four-inch and six-inch blocks, including multi-part blocks, were exactly the right measurements. You can also import the blocks from Sew Precise! Into your Electric Quilt design program, but this is not nearly as easy to do as it is in Foundation Factory. The program provides detailed instructions, but due to the peculiarities of EQ3, which is a DOS-based program, and its system of projects, using these blocks in electronic quilt design requires a few workarounds. Experienced EQ users should have few problems, however, and for newcomers the instructions are quite detailed.
Other things that are not as easy in this program include the choice of English or metric measurements. The desired measurement in Sew Precise! Must be selected at installation and cannot easily be changed later. You also cannot pull up the block print screen by double-clicking on a block.
Carol Doak Foundation Paper
Instead you must select one by clicking on it and then click on the print button at the top of the screen. The default block 'frame,' which shows which block you've selected, is white and is hard to see, but you can change it to a more prominent color if you wish from the right-click selection box.
The print block screen shows only one rendering of the block in either line, grayscale, or color, depending on your selection of block display type in the main window. There is a very good preview capability, however, which shows quite clearly what you will get on the printed page. So which one of these programs should you buy? They are priced identically and each offers strong features for foundation piecers.
Their interfaces are easy to use and their help files are thorough. The blocks in them are sufficiently different that you could buy both with very little duplication. Which way you go may depend on which quilt design software you currently own.
Compatibility with either Quilt-Pro or Electric Quilt is an important consideration for value-added to the program. If you have an older computer on which you are still using Windows 3.1, you will have to select Foundation Factory, as Sew Precise! Works only with Windows 95. If you aren't already committed to a quilt design program, and have Windows 95, the edge probably goes to Sew Precise! It has the largest block libraries and a nicer overall feel, plus more accuracy in the patterns it produces.