Customising the appearance of your stitches in Stitchmastery Version 3

This video explains the new method of customising stitches in Stitchmastery Version 3.

If you’ve never created a User Library in Stitchmastery or need more help with the technical side of customising stitches (eg considering how much a stitch consumes and produces, and what the wrong side version should be) read the “Viewing and Editing Stitch Libraries” section under Tasks in the Help menu in Stitchmastery, or section 3 of the Stitchmastery User Manual at https://www.stitchmastery.com/support/. The following tutorials may help too – Creating User Stitch Libraries and Migrating User Libraries to Version 3 and Opening Version 2 charts in Version 3.

Choose the User Library you want to use and click Edit/View. The table view of stitches in that library will appear.

You can choose to Edit a stitch, but bear in mind, this means the original stitch you edit will no longer be there in its original form – for instance, if I change the Slip stitch “V” symbol, and want to use that again in the future, I’ll have to recreate it. Using the Duplicate option will create a new version of that stitch if you want to make a slight change. If you want to create a brand new stitch, click New.

In the Edit Stitch dialog which opens, there are lots of options to edit including the name, abbreviation, which drawer it should appear in and so on (see the above files for help on this).

Click on Edit Appearance and our canvas opens showing the stitch cell in question. There are two options for what to use to fill your stitch – a Stitchmastery symbol set, or a font. They behave in slightly different ways.

There are 6 Stitchmastery symbol sets which are preloaded in the software. To add a new symbol to your stitch, click and drag (using your mouse or trackpad) in the cell to select either the whole cell or a smaller part of it. The area of the cell you’ve selected will be highlighted. Then click the symbol or symbols of your choice and they will appear in the area you have selected. You can then click and drag to select another area and add smaller or bigger symbols, or symbols from another Stitchmastery symbol set.

If you have made a mistake or want to change something you’ve added, you have three options:
– the Remove button operates like Undo – it removes the symbol you added most recently, and then the one before, and so on;
– if you want to restore the stitch to its original appearance, click Reset;
– if you want to clear the whole cell to a blank canvas, click Clear. Reset will still bring the original appearance back if you’ve chosen to Duplicate or Edit a stitch rather than create a New one, even if you’ve cleared to a blank canvas.

Fonts behave slightly differently than symbol sets. You can choose from any of the fonts installed in your machine, they will all appear in the drop-down menu. You can see there is an option to change the size of the font – if you use bigger or smaller cells than the default, you might want to change the size of the font. You can see the character map with a scroll bar at the right hand side.

Rather than clicking and dragging to highlight a space, with fonts you’ll see your pointer arrow turns into a capital I text cursor, and wherever you click will behave like the start of a line of text. When you’ve clicked with the text cursor you can either use your mouse to click on the character you want, or use your keyboard to type.

If you type multiple characters, they will reduce in size to fit into the given space. You can click the cursor into another area and start typing there too if you want to have multiple characters of the same size, although for a stitch that’s only one cell wide, you probably won’t have much need to do that. Unlike the symbols, you can change your characters by clicking on them, for instance if you want to remove one or more of the characters, you can use the backspace or delete keys on your keyboard.

If you decide you want to change the font, you can click into any of the text lines you’ve created and then select a new font. You’ll see only the characters you have selected will change – any other characters will remain in the previous font. If you want to add extra characters in the previous font, you need to change the font selection back – if you click on a text line in a different font, an alert box will warn you that clicking the text will change its font.

Once you are happy with the appearance of your stitch, click ok, check your settings, and click Ok. In the video, you can see my new stitch is now appearing at the bottom of my Basic Stitches drawer.

Click ok and out of the Preferences dialog to get back to your chart. The open chart is currently using a different library so to use the new stitch, click Diagram and Edit Diagram Properties. Open the Stitch Library and Text Templates tab, select the user library from the menu, check the Refresh Text in Key box, and click ok. Stitchmastery is now using the relevant user library and you can open the relevant drawer and insert the new stitch into the chart.