Tuesday 5 May 2015

Learning EQ7

I recently bought EQ7, as I'm interested in writing patterns. If you haven't heard of it, it's a computer program to design quilts. I watched one video tutorial, then wanted to get right to designing! I'm impatient, I tell you. The impetus for buying it was to write a pattern for my Jewel Burst quilt. But, well, I hadn't taken detailed enough notes and I wasn't sure where to start and there was a new quilt to design... so I figured it would do another quilt first. I started a few different quilts before realizing I needed to skip the traditional layouts and go straight to custom. There would be time to learn those later. It took some reading of the manual, using the help menu and getting tips from other users, but I started to figure it out.

Learning that the usual Mac shortcut keys (such as copy and paste) worked the same made it much easier. As did learning how to make blocks, flip and rotate and align. So far, I've finished a pattern for one quilt. And then realized how much fun and easy it was to try out different colour combinations in the blocks! Which gave my one pattern a dozen or more variations that completely change its look. I'm working on sewing up the original quilt now and have a couple other people testing my pattern out to see how it works. I'm hoping to release the pattern in July.

I'd like to keep the quilt a secret for once, but here are a few scenes from the sewing space:

Pinning some parallelograms on my bed
Fabric pinned and stacked, ready to sew
Supervising from her blanket
Blues and browns
Being a good girl, staying on her blanket and off my quilt!
Quilting and cat photos! Good thing this is on my sewing blog and not Facebook - people might start un-friending me!

4 comments:

  1. I have mixed feelings about EQ7 - It does make some things easier but sometimes it seems to get in the way of my creative process in designing quilts that aren't repeated blocks. I'm curious to see what you're creating with these colors though, you seem very excited which means it'll be awesome!!

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  2. Beautiful photos of quilts and cats!

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  3. I too have mixed feelings about EQ7 - for exactly the same reason as Terri Ann gave. I know I need to spend more time with the program but then that takes time away from sewing ;) LOVE the fabrics you are using on this new quilt and I cannot wait to see what it looks like all put together!

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