Friday, April 1, 2011

Do You See How Much I {Heart} Quatrefoil?

I was looking at someone's blog yesterday (I'm sorry whoever you are, I clicked on you through a blog, through another blog so I can't remember how I got to you to thank you for the idea, but if I ever find you again I'll make sure to update my post) and saw that her background was quatrefoil.  I just posted about {heart}ing it the other day, so I was super excited. 

Then I thought to myself How much do I really {heart} quatrefoil if I don't even have it in my blog design?  I made a decision.  I HAD to have a quatrefoil background.  I still wanted it to be in my current color scheme, so It's not like I could just find a quatrefoil pattern online somewhere and use that.  I'd have to make my own. 

WARNING: It was a really tedious process since the only artsy program I had available was Microsoft Publisher.  I'll show you how I did it, but you might want to come up with an easier way if you do it yourself.   

I started out by making a circle, then I copied it three times and put the circles together like this:
Now I had the basic shape I needed, but what about the outline?  I copied the shape, chose a lighter color and then enlarged it a little, so it looked like this:
Next I copied the entire shape and lined it up next to the original like this:
And then I copied them again:
And again, and again, and again.  Finally I added a square in the background that was the same color as my original circles and voila! Quatrefoil:
 This would have been the end point for most people, but I wanted a more delicate quatrefoil.  So I just kept copying bigger and bigger chunks of pattern until I finally settled with this:
To be honest, I would have made the pattern even small, but copying all those circles a million times really bogged down my computer.  So what do you think?  Do you {heart} it as much as I do?  Do you know of a better way I could have done it?  Let me know if there's a program online that would have made my life easier... 

2 comments:

Lauren @ 31diy said...

You really do {heart} quatrefoil! lol. And I do too! I'm also sort of getting into chevron. I made my own chevron template and I plan on posting that soon.

As for a program, I don't know if it would make it any easier, but a great editing program that is free to download is Gimp (http://www.gimp.org/). It takes a little while to get used to, but you can really do a lot with it.

Kate said...

I found your blog by googling " how to create a quatrefoil pattern using Microsoft Publisher"!!!! So thank you! I've always wondered how people create all of their patterned paper etc and I just can't figure it out but at least I can do this one now.

When I did mine I created one and got it just right. then i grouped it all (Arrange-->group). Then I hit "copy" and pasted to creat 3 more like you said above. Then I took that group of four and then copied them along one line. So at this point i basically have two lines of the pattern going across the page.

Then I took that entire line, hit "select all" (ctrl a), then on your toolbar under (Arrange-->group) all of them and then I just repeated that long line. Does that make sense?!

Hopefully that will make it faster. I'm going to try to do a chevron pattern next!

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