CorelDRAW Graphics Suite And Mimaki Give North Carolina Artistic Quilt-Maker A Creative Edge
Award winning quilt-maker Barbara Webster creates her quilt designs in CorelDRAW Graphics Suite, and then has them printed on a Mimaki digital textile printer.
Barbara Webster lives on a 30-acre mountain farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains in western North Carolina with her husband and two dogs.
For many years she worked as a graphic designer in an office, creating brochures and other publications using Adobe PageMaker.
After she moved to the mountains from Charlotte, NC, she decided to start making quilts.
She obviously had a talent for it – her first quilt won Best First Quilt in the Asheville Quilt Show.
This event launched her new career as founder and principal owner of quilt designing company Starforest Quilts.
“In the early days you could only use photographic images on your quilts by using heat-transfer methods. It wasn’t a very rewarding process – you couldn’t really print the images on natural fabrics, the image had a rubbery texture and the quilts were not washable. I also found out I was allergic to the fumes,” says Barbara with a sigh.
The combination of new wide-format, specialized printers from companies like Mimaki and the rapid advancement of computer processing power made it possible for quilt designers like Barbara Webster to print high-resolution photographic images in vivid color on 100% cotton fabric.
“I remember casually watching somebody over the shoulder as they were playing with CorelDRAW a few years ago,” says Barbara. “They inserted photos into different shapes, like squares and triangles, an flipped them around and manipulated them with such remarkable ease. I stopped dead in my tracks and I knew that this would enable me to create exactly the quilts I could see inside my head."
Barbara bought a copy of CorelDRAW Graphics Suite the next day and started to create her own quilt designs immediately. She typically starts by taking photos of nature scenes with her 5 mega-pixel digital camera Nikon Coolpix 5700.
After importing the image files into CorelDRAW, she starts to place the images in different patterns to see if she can come up with an interesting composition.
“DRAW has some amazing features I use everyday. They save me hours,” she explains
“The first one is Power Clip, I just love how easy it is to insert an image into a shape and position it exactly where I want. Another feature is Snap To Object. I could try to line up all the hundreds of shapes in my quilt designs by hand, but it would take forever and it wouldn’t be nearly as accurate.”
Some quilt designers use special quilt-making software like Electric Quilter and Quilt Pro, but according to Barbara Webster, many professional quilt designers use CorelDRAW.
“There’s no comparison in my mind,” says Barbara. “You can’t really use photos in those other applications. The preview window is tiny, making it very hard to get an idea of what the final quilt will look like. They’re just not very user-friendly if you want to use photos. The only advantage is that they calculate yardage automatically, but I don’t really need that feature anyway. CorelDRAW not only saves me a lot of time, it actually helps me come up with the designs. It’s like having a design partner.”
Once she has created her design in CorelDRAW, she exports her files as 300 dpi TIFFs and burns them on a CD.
The CD is then sent to a friend who owns a large- format Mimaki ink-jet printer. This specialty printer is designed to handle thicker fabrics in wide formats –she can print images up to 55” wide and 3 yards long!
Says Barbara: "You can actually print longer than 3 yards. We have discovered, however, that 3 yards is all that will fit reasonably well into the steamer so we limit the runs to 3 yards."
“I prefer to use images I’ve taken myself, because I really need high-quality, high resolution images in order to get a good result,” says Barbara. “Every single shape in my quilts contains a 300 dpi TIFF image. My quilt ‘Spring in the Smokies’ for instance, consists of over 500 triangles. The final DRAW file was over 1.8 GB in size – I had to buy a new DVD-burner to back it up!”
