Learning to make a Pixelated Quilt.

I've been taking a free Crafty class on Pixelating your quilt.  Great course, taught me a lot, and you did need to do a lot of math.  But when reading some of the comments on the side of the course I made two great discoveries.

I found that the Victoria and Albert has a patchwork pattern maker that is absolutely perfect!!!  You do need an account to download your patchwork, but the simplicity of this program is fantastic.

You upload a picture that you think will work, you choose what type of square you will use for selection (square, portrait, etc), then the machine runs the program, and you can fine tune it to say if you want to do only 15 colours, more colours, and if you want to do HTS (half triangle squares like the example above).  Below is one that I made.

You can choose the size you want the squares.

So here is the the one I am trying to do.  The original picture:

This is the picture of the sunflower after going into the Victoria and Albert web site.

After putting the picture as a background picture in excel I was able to colour each cell and put in the letter code (the A, B, C, etc).  Then using a formula for excel "=COUNTIF(A2:AD23, "b")" - don't do the double quotes on the outside.  

So with the count, I can guestimate how much material I need for making 2.5 inch size squares.

I'm now at the point that I am cutting the 2.5 inch squares, and larger pieces for the same colour sections.  I used the same excel sheet to mark the sections that I want to do (This is where I differ from the Crafty course) as a larger piece, and then calculate those sizes, deducting the 1/4 seam allowance.  See to the side.  This way, making this quilt is a little faster.  But you don't have to do this.  

So now, I need to cut my pieces.  I'll keep you posted.  I will be using light weight interface to keep the squares together. 

wish me luck....