Work in Programming

I’ve been doing a lot of programming lately. Programming is weird. With a quilt, once the binding is on, you know it’s done. Well, I hear stories of people who go back and add quilting or applique or whatever, but for me, once the binding is on, the quilt’s done and I move on to the next thing.

With programming there’s always more you can add. ALWAYS. There is no “binding” step to signal the completion. So I have all these little.. for lack of a better term.. toy programs that I’ve written and haven’t shared because they’re not done. Even Palette Builder still says beta even though I haven’t touched the code in months. And the last time was just to remove the share button because Flickr broke it back in July but apparently no one uses that functionality anyway because no one mentioned it and it took me 2 months to even realize it myself. An instagram share button would likely be more useful these days anyway.

Right. The point of all that is I’ve written these toy programs and I’m going to share them with you, but they aren’t done. There is no binding, and the quilting is kinda wacky and I may pick it out and start that part over. But the design is there, and maybe you’ll ignore the wacky quilting.

Also, an important note: these programs are currently being developed. So sometimes you might go to the link and it’s broken or doing something weird. Think of it like seeing a live video of someone making a quilt. One time you might visit and I’m unpicking a seam, and another time I’m trying it out with a red border, and another time it’s just sitting there on display to be enjoyed. When the programs are finalized (hah!), they will move to another more stable place.

Oh geeze Anne, shut up and just show us the programs, we get it. Right, sorry.

Color Play

On Monday I mentioned a palette generator program. That palette generator program is called Color Play and you can find here:
http://www.play-crafts.com/betas/pg.html

The way Color Play works is that it randomly picks a starting color, and then will generate a palette with 4-10 colors using a monochromatic, analogous, complementary, or split complementary color scheme. There’s some hidden functionality in this one which I will add to the page eventually so everyone can use it, but for the more advanced users, you can set the base color, number of colors and color scheme it uses by passing it along in the URL.

For instance, a 6 color analogous palette using marsala as the base color uses this URL:

http://www.play-crafts.com/betas/pg.html?numcolors=6&scheme=an&base=955251

Scheme options are mono, an, comp, and splitcomp. It will take any number of colors, feel free to make tiny toothpicks of color. And the base color should be specified in rgb hex value. If you don’t understand any of that, don’t worry about it. 🙂 I will add actual buttons for everyone’s enjoyment at some point.

I also made it so you could sort the colors shown in hue, saturation or value order. Just use the buttons at the bottom.

Equal

Monday I also showed you some of the things Equal has created. Equal is a equilateral triangle design generator. It actually uses palettes provided by color play for the designs it creates. You can find equal here:
http://www.play-crafts.com/betas/equal.html

Right now you can have it generate a new pattern & palette, generate a new palette using the same pattern, or generate a new pattern using the same colors. You can also increase or decrease the size of the triangles. Doing so will make a new pattern but will keep the same colors.

This project was heavily inspired by the incredible work of  Libs Elliot.

Playful Patterns

This project has the most work to be done, and is the least toy like. (There’s a correlation there.) The idea behind this is that it should be possible, given a pattern and some customization by the user, to generate a pattern to fit the user’s specific needs.

You can find the first playful pattern here:
http://www.play-crafts.com/betas/input.html

I’ve started with a very simple design for a lined sleeve for a laptop, or cell phone or whatever. You can specify the dimensions of the thing you’re making the sleeve for, and the program will generate yardage requirements, a cut list, and a pattern based on those dimensions. I’d love to develop this further.

Like I stated on Facebook, “I wrote a program that generated a pattern that when followed made this perfectly custom-fit laptop sleeve. And they say computers aren’t interested in fashion.” You’ll see I added a flap to mine. Elizabeth Hartman has an awesome laptop sleeve tutorial about how to do that if you’d like to do the same.

Okay, I think that’s it for now. Thank you for sticking through the longest post ever. Hopefully you all have fun playing with these programs! If you have feedback or want to show off what you made, feel free to share with me!