Creating patterns from existing designs

Sometimes, we purchase programs that cease to exist or just plain suck, but we have designs we created that we want to use inside BeadCreator. For example, Beadscape, which was a very popular program up until the late 1990's, left many people in the lurch with patterns trapped inside a program that was no longer being developed or maintained. Over the years, we have seen BeadPlan, BeadCellar, and a host of others come and go. Several years ago we tried to develop an XML standard that could be interchanged with other developers so that patterns could be exported and imported into competing programs, but it fell on deaf ears.

As an alternative, we developed a color matching algorithm which would let you take most patterns and convert them into BeadCreator's format using a graphical interface. This video shows how you can take your existing pattern printout or image and have a good success in duplicating it. If you want to follow along, the image sample we used is included here - just right-click to save it to your computer and open it in BeadCreator. Follow along and you can create exactly what we have created.

Please note that taking a design that was created by another artist and using it to build a pattern as your own (outside of the public domain) is wrong. This feature of BeadCreator was designed to let you import your OWN patterns, not the work of others.

Sample Image: