My wife decided we needed a small stone patio for our fountain and a chair or two. She bought some concrete pavers that have an odd shape so they sort of look like stone. They look like the picture above. It is an interesting shape. I had used just three of them to place the fountain on. I had also tried earlier to lay them out on the grass to see how to arrange them so that they fit with minimal gaps. They are 2 inch thick and about 28” long so they are pretty heavy. It was a problem to figure out how to arrange them.
Being the geek that I am, I took the picture above with my cell phone and sent it to my email address. For me that is easier than finding the usb cable for the phone and figuring out how to get them out of the phone. It takes about 1 minute to make it to my email inbox from the cell phone.
I then took that image into paint.net . Using paint.net I added a layer and got the outline of the paver on its own layer. I think there is an easier way to have paint.net find the outline and make a line there, but I don’t know paint.net very well. I just used the drawing tool and drew the line around the image. Then I saved that as a jpg file. I then took that image and inserted it into a word document three to a sheet. I printed out 8 of those sheets.
I cut out those “paper dolls” 4 sheets at a time. Now I could work on arranging these odd shaped dolls into a patio right on my kitchen table. These don’t weight nearly as much as the real deal. I finally figured out the trick and came up with this layout. It didn’t take too long now that I could slide them are on the table easily. This helped me understand the pattern. I printed this out and took it outside and it really helped in laying the pavers out quickly without a lot of fussing.
I didn’t have enough pavers and it was too hot to work further but we will get more and finish the job soon. It all worked well I think. Its not finished yet but it is turning out well
I also published this using windows live writer with some help from Lance Larsen, way cool.