I’m a day early this month because tomorrow we’re doing the big Stitch Tease Reveal (get off the edge of your seats now please, I can’t have you all excited while you’re trying to draw a pattern ;o) )  This month we’re going for a good, old-fashioned teapot, which I’m going to tackle in Photoshop.  Now I have CS5, but I believe that most, if not all of these things should be in Elements as well, give me a shout if they’re not and I’ll work through it.

For the sew-alongers, the block is available here, happy sewing!  If you have any problems with assembling the pattern, check out the Foundation Paper Piecing For The Terrified series which will take you through sewing a pattern.

For the draw-alongers, it’s time to open up Photoshop and open a new document:

Now I suggest you go with a size that corresponds with a piece of standard printer paper, simply for ease of printing it out later, but you can make it any size you wish as long as you are ultimately able to print it!  I’m going for an A4 option anyway:

Unfortunately Adobe believes that all paper should be portrait orientation, whereas with this would be better in landscape, so what to do?  I switched the numbers round, then I selected the ‘Save Preset’ button on the right and named it A4 Landscape so I can use it again another time:

Now when I got in to create a new document, I get that option in my drop down:

Opening it up, my next step is to turn on my grid, so I can break things down more easily:

Then I turn on my rulers from the same main menu:

Now I need to get my line tool.  The menu on the left hand side has all the tools at my disposal, and the one I need is the 4th tool in the 3rd section down.  Now rather unfortunately as each of these tools has multiple options, it depends on what you selected last, what the icon will look like.  This one can be any shape, including a line, but if it isn’t a line right now, just click and hold on the icon and the alternative options will show up, then choose the line.

Having select the line, it’s time to put down the base of the teapot.  I usually keep my line weight in the top menu to 5 px and the colour to black, and in case you can’t really see it against the grid, it’s on the 7″ line:

Now to build up the teapot.  Although we’ve looked at building curves before, I don’t want this one to be too complex as I have some other plans for it, but feel free to combine what you learned in the last block to make this a bit more curvy than I have.  Here’s the body of mine:

Now for the lid:

And the handle:

And the spout:

With the teapot complete, it’s time to break down the block for pattern pieces.  The first obvious choice is to separate the middle section out from the curved sections:

Then a small extension of lines completes the lid:

Next the handle.  We’re trying to have the least amount of pieces possible, and having played around with the options, this was the best breakdown I could find.  Feel free to play around with your own options for this:

Now the spout.  This is rather more complex than the handle because of the additional angles, so I start with the top right hand section, extending my angles out like we did for the curves last block, finally extending a couple of straight lines to create a usable section:

The remaining sections are easier to break down using principles from previous blocks, and in fact when I cam to numbering it I realise I could remove the line between the outline of the original teapot and the spout, because it is the same fabric, and can be joined together:

Finally, it’s time to number the sections using the text tool

At this stage it’s hard to see how the spout works, which is probably why this seems so magical when it all comes out right in the end!