Mood:
downNow Playing: "Robots" - Dearest Son is drawing various characters, and needs the reference...
Today, I started the long-put-off task of rescanning those three toddler-doll patterns I bought back in February or sometime. I love those 99c pattern sales, but I'm also glad there's nothing I want now. I'd ironed them flat, then, once the original scans were done, carefully folded them so the pattern number/letter showed, and ironed them again. It's one way to get them back into the envelope without much fuss. With that done, I figured the rescan would go much faster, since the cut out and iron stuff was done already.
Urggh. I've stood at the scanner longer than I want you to know about, and I'm barely halfway done. Beware the patterns that are three sizes in one envelope. Sure, it only has twelve pieces...but that's actually twelve times three. And since one of the sizes is huge, you'll have to scan it in sections - there was one I had to scan six times to get the whole thing.
You'd think scanning wouldn't take long. Slap it on the scanner bed, hit the button, and save it, on to the next one. I admit, I used to do it that way. But then I got in a pattern exchange group and started noticing how others did it, and I wanted mine to look nice, too. I also wanted to use as little printer ink as possible when it was time to actually sew something.
So I made sure there was a 'this is 1 inch' ruler or mark on there, to verify it prints at the right size. And I started 'bleaching' a pattern until it was just black outline and text. No colors to bleed those expensive color cartridges. Then I got rid of the French and Spanish - it's nice to know that a sleeve is 'manga' elsewhere, and I'm probably rude for removing them. But it makes the pattern look so much cleaner, it's less confusing at first glance, and that makes it more likely to actually be used sometime.
Here's an example : Photo removed due to space limitations.
The one on your left is fresh from the scanner. It gets cropped, to make sure it'll fit on a single page of printout, then it gets 'bleached', and the stuff I don't need gets erased, in PaintShopPro. I often have to erase stray marks, pattern folds, and random dots, too, and I'm getting better at redrawing lines that didn't scan well. It's easy to see the lines I drew here !
It's a lot of effort, and it gets old and tired fast. But to me, it's worth it. The pattern looks a lot less confusing at first glance, it's much easier to read, and it uses a lot less ink. I even found a way to do most of the bleaching while it's scanning, thanks to settings in the Brother printer - and I can even save those settings, thanks to 'custom buttons', so I don't have to reset 'em on every piece. So I even learned something on this go-round.
It just ranks that I'm only halfway done, and my eyes are blurry. I close the top to the scanner, of course, but cropping, erasing, and renaming does take it out of ya. And here's something you might find funny - I am so paranoid about losing these scans again that I've already backed up what I did onto a CD. You'd think I'd wait 'til tomorrow, when I'll finish if it destroys me, to burn a backup but I just couldn't walk away until I verified that all this work was stored away from the hard drive. It's kind of a waste, because I'll just burn another when all this is over, but if it lets me rest, it's worth it.
Frankly, if I had to scan these three patterns again, I'd probably toss 'em out the window and into the lake that used to be our front yard !
