Monday 6 May 2013

inkscape tutorial - put text on a path

This week's contest on spoonflower is birthday-themed wrapping paper. For my entry I used a design I made a few weeks ago but added the text happy birthday. I wanted the text to follow the lines of the vines and flower stems. This tutorial shows how to put text onto a path using inkscape.



1. Write your text, choose the font you want to use and size it so it will fit where you want it to go.

2. draw a path using the bezier curves tool, curving it to follow your line. I first drew the line in black,

3. and then made it invisible (unlike the clip function, with this function you still see the line after you put the text on the path, so if you don't want to see it, make it invisible). Then select the path and your text.

4. Text - Put on path

5. and your text curves to follow the path! If the text doesn't quite fit (it starts at the beginning of the path and gets cut off at the end) you can undo, resize and try again.

6. Basically thats all, but I wanted the text to take the place of the existing lines, so I had to remove the vine where the text was. For that I selected two nodes and clicked on "break path at selected nodes".

7. Then I could move those nodes, do the same at the other end, and delete that section of the vine.

8. The text fits perfectly!

Here's the finished design:




Sunday 5 May 2013

Sunday afternoon


I have a lot of projects simmering in my head that I want to share here. In fact, one of the projects has been spread all over the living room floor the last few days making me feel a bit antsy (I will clean it all up this evening!) But I want to rather share three pictures from right here and now. Sitting on the balcony in the evening sunlight with a big mug of milky tea, my embroidery and a book. It's a nice way to end a rather quiet weekend.

 
Here's a close up of the embroidery. Its a bit kitschy but I like it (others don't :-))



And a glance out across the trees and houses. Its nice to hear bits of activity around me, see people eating supper on their balcony, hear a ball bouncing somewhere and a neighbour listening to the radio.



I haven't planted anything yet this year. I want to buy some flowers this week. The purple ones I got from my neighbour yesterday as a thankyou for watering her plants. The strawberry is back in its fourth year and already has lots of little mini strawberries growing, I'm impressed! I think the rose is also four years old. This winter I didn't cover it but it seems fine. Not like my hydrangeas and lavender which all died. I was surprised to see a forget-me-not plant growing, it also survived the winter.