Designing on the Computer: Blocks with Triangles

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You may remember earlier I did a little tutorial on how I design using the computer program Word.  This is lesson two featuring quilt blocks with triangles.  If you are looking for lesson one, you can find it here.

As I write this tutorial I am going to make the assumption that you read tutorial number one and have worked a bit with it.  I am not going to be quite as basic with every single step.

Let’s make a pinwheel block today.  That will give you and idea on how to create triangles in case you want to branch out and do some of your own designing.

First step…open a blank document in Word.  Go to Auto Shapes on your tool bar and click through until you find the square.

Right click your mouse.  Click on the square.  Go to the Format Autoshape option.  Under the colors and lines options Go to Color then Fill Effects. Pick your colors.  Go to size option and select 1.5 x 1.5 for now.  Then click through the okays.

You should now have a colored square.  Now let’s put a triangle inside the square.  Go to autoshapes on your tool bar and make a triangle.

Click on the triangle.  Under the colors and lines options Go to Color then Fill Effects. Pick your colors.  Go to size option and select 1.5 x 1.5 for now.  Then click through the okays.

You should now have a colored triangle.  Click on the triangle and drag it so it covers the square.  Now we want to group the square and triangle so they can move and be treated as one unit.  We need to group them.  Click on each object while holding the shift key down.  Right clip and go to the grouping option.  This was explained more in depth in lesson one so if you have trouble try re-reading that.

Now we need four of those triangles to create a pinwheel block.  Click on the first unit and then right click.  Hit copy.  Right click again and hit paste.  Repeat until you have 4 units.  Again, this was explained more in depth in lesson one.

Now we need to take those units and create a pinwheel.  Click on one of the units.  Go to the Draw button on the tool bar.  Click rotate or flip.  Then pick one of the options.  Units can be made to mirror images either horizontally or vertically.  They can also be rotated a 90 degree turn.

Continue with each object getting it in the placement you would like.  Sometimes a unit will not go into place and will be slightly “off”.  To fix this, click on the unit.  Hold the control key down and hit the arrow key in the direction you would like the unit to move.  If you hold the control key down then the object only moves one pixel at a time.  If you don’t hold the control down and just use the arrow keys, it moves farther.

Once your units are in the position you like, click on all the units, right click and group them together making one pinwheel block.

That’s it for today’s lesson.  The goal was for you to be able to make triangles and for you to be able to move and rotate objects.

There seems to be a lot of interest in this so I hope to be doing a whole series of these posts as time allows.  Watch for the next one-we’ll learn how to put the blocks together with sashing and change colors.

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