Scarlet Quince News
April 2016

My apologies for being off the air, so to speak. I have a very special cat who is nearing the end of his life and he has been taking quite a toll in terms of time spent caring for him, worrying, and stress in general. He has been a very good friend, so I owe him the very best care possible. But it has cut significantly into my work time. His name is Lucky, and he's 17. This picture was taken a few years ago.

We have a new tutorial on stitch paths. It's not really a step-by-step tutorial like most of our others -- like the Pirate's Code, it's more a set of guidelines. But I hope it will be helpful.

We were recently asked if it's possible to search for the next occurence of a symbol in an electronic pattern. A little to my surprise, it is (sort of). Here's how it works. Let's say you want to search for the next occurrence of a solid black circle. You highlight the circle, copy it, and paste it into the search box. You'll see that what is pasted is the letter l. The reason is that all the symbols are actually letters in various symbol and dingbat fonts. If you click the next button (or type control-F or control-G) it will go to the next letter l. It might not be a solid circle. It might be a letter l in the pattern title, or it might be a different symbol that is also represented by a letter l in some other font. You can cut down on unwanted matches by specifying a case-sensitive search.

Darn, some of you are saying, I have a printed pattern but I'd like to be able to do that. You may not be aware of it, but we have always provided replacement pages in PDF form for people who have had something happen to a page. Now that we sell electronic patterns, we will also provide anyone who has bought a printed pattern with an electronic copy of their pattern free of charge. Just ask!