1 Start with a photograph
Choose a photograph, then tap/click the object. Often that is enough. If part is missing — a spoon's handle is the usual one — drag across what it left out and it will be added.
You can also drop a photograph here, or paste one.
Tips for success with photos
None of this is required — the tool is built for ordinary photographs taken with an ordinary phone. These shift the odds.
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Blur the background. Use portrait mode if your phone has it.
This is the single biggest improvement. The tool finds your object by looking for edges, and a sharp background offers hundreds of competing ones — leaf boundaries, grain lines, shadow edges, some stronger than your object's own. Blurring deletes the competition.
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Use a contrasting background. Light object on dark cloth, or the reverse. On wood, lay it across the grain.
The easiest thing to get right and the most common thing to get wrong, because the natural instinct is to set a wooden object on a wooden bench. Grain running parallel to your object's edge competes with it directly and the tool can follow the wrong line — so turning the object ninety degrees can rescue a photograph nothing else will.
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If the selection is wrong, change the gesture. Tap first; if that fails, drag along the object's length.
A tap says "the object is near here." A drag says "the object is this whole long thing" — much more information. Tap the widest part, not a narrow one. On a narrow or edge-on view — a spoon seen from the side is thinner than the fingers holding it — start with the drag. Changing the gesture fixes things erasing cannot.
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Avoid hard shadows. Indirect light is all you need — an overcast day is ideal. Keep your own shadow out of the frame.
Ordinary room light or open shade is fine; you are not lighting a photograph, only avoiding hard-edged shadows. A hard shadow edge looks exactly like an object edge to the tool, and one running alongside your object competes with the very edge it is trying to find. Standing between the light and the object puts that false line in the worst possible place.
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Holding it is fine. A spoon on an open palm works well. Keep fingertips from sticking out past its outline.
Hands behind the object are usually excluded correctly — an open palm, or fingers hidden beneath it, give the tool nothing that competes with your object's outline. What it does struggle with is a fingertip protruding past that outline, which it tends to read as part of the object. So an open palm beats a pinched grip, and where you tap or stroke matters more than whether a hand is in the frame at all.
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Shoot square-on. Phone parallel to the object, directly above it. One object, filling the frame, with a margin.
Your pattern is a true-scale silhouette, so a photograph taken at an angle produces a foreshortened pattern that measures short on paper. The margin matters too: an outline touching all four edges cannot be told apart from a selected background, and is reported as a failure.
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Nothing here is make-or-break. Whatever the photograph gives you, you can fix it by hand in the next step.
Once a photograph is chosen, Start touching up gives you the tools to correct anything the tool got wrong. Remove specks clears detached noise in one press and often does most of the work. Erase takes away what should not be there — a finger, a shadow, a patch of background — and Paint adds what should, including detail the photograph cannot show, such as a neck you mean to carve thicker than the original. Remove a piece and Snip Off take out whole regions at once, and Undo means nothing you try costs you anything.
The tinted overlay shows what the tool selected — judge it before you trace. If a photograph resists all of this, another one against a different background is nearly always faster than correcting a bad selection.
Copied an image? Paste it here.
2 Lay out the pattern
Set the length — any size you like, from a teaspoon to an oar. Guides and layout lines annotate; make symmetrical reshapes the pattern.
The longest dimension your finished carving should be. Everything scales proportionally — width follows length and the shape is never stretched, so a 6" spoon and a 12" spoon are the same design at two sizes. Change it whenever you like and the pattern below redraws; the printed page is always true to your chosen measurement. One size applies to every pattern in the set, so they line up with each other on the blank.
Drag a line down the axis of symmetry on the pattern below, then pick which of the two results you want. One side is mirrored onto the other, so both match. A short stroke is enough — the whole axis is worked out from its direction.
Make symmetrical replaces the traced shape. Undo steps back one mirroring, and cancel keeps the original.
Available once you have chosen a shape above. You will be able to show a centerline and registration marks, make the shape symmetrical, and draw layout lines on it.
The pattern is stood upright for you, using the object's own long direction.
That is a guess, and on a shape with no clear long direction — a bowl seen
from above — it is left as photographed.
Use these when the guess is wrong, or when you would rather work with the
pattern the other way round. Turning the pattern takes your layout lines with
it, and never changes the printed size.
Tracing a photograph leaves the edge slightly ragged — a stair-step that comes
from the pixels, not from your object. Smoothing takes that out.
It is deliberately gentle, and it eases off wherever the shape is narrow, so a
thin neck or a small notch stays the size it really is. If smoothing cannot be
done without changing the shape, it is not applied and you are told. Turn it
off to see exactly what was traced.
Reference lines printed with the pattern to help you orient it on the blank —
the grid for scale and the centerline for squaring it up. Turn off
any you do not want; they are printed guidance, not part of the shape.
Registration marks are five ticks placed for you: both ends, the middle, and
the two points halfway between. They sit at the same proportion of
every view, so they stay put when you change the size. Line them up
when transferring to the wood and the top and side views will agree.
Mirrors one side of your outline about an axis you choose, so both sides match. Draw the axis, then pick which of the two results you want. A short line is enough — you do not have to draw the whole length of the object. Only the line's angle and position matter, so a brief stroke through the middle defines the same axis as a long one. You can mirror again on a different axis to refine the shape. The traced shape is replaced — undo steps back one mirroring, and cancel keeps the original.
A line you strike against while carving. Drag across the pattern to draw one at
any angle; nearly-square strokes snap square. Drag either end afterwards to
adjust it. They print as dashed lines, darker than the guides, because they are
meant to be worked to rather than just read.
Useful when a guide is not what you want: turn off the centerline above and
draw your own where you think it belongs.
3 Print
Patterns print together as one PDF, each starting on its own page. Long patterns tile across sheets with marks for taping them together.
Finish laying out your pattern, then add it here.
Browser storage is unavailable, so your work will not be preserved if you reload. Everything else works normally.
Clears everything — the photograph, the pattern, and the print set.