Behind the Mouse: The Electric Quilt Blog

Thank you to everyone who submitted to September’s design challenge! This was such a fun challenge and you all shared some amazing designs! Check out all the wonderful entries we received here. Winners Two winners were selected, one by Patti Carey and the other was selected randomly. Congratulations to…. Winner 1 (Patti Carey’s Pick): LaTawnia Porter “I so enjoyed seeing the submissions. There are some very clever designs, making this a tough choice. I finally settled on LaTawnia Porter’s design – it’s a terrific use of the fabric and an eye-catching design.” – Patti Carey Winner 2 (Random Pick): K Davis Congrats to our winners! If you’re looking for another chance to win fabric, check out October’s design challenge!

In honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, we are partnering with Moda to offer Leather and Lace and Amazing Grace by Cathe Holden as October’s Fabric of the Month. With this collection, Cathe shares her personal story as a breast cancer survivor. All of the motifs in the line were chosen with a special meaning behind them relating to her journey. We encourage you to watch the video below to hear Cathe’s full story. A bundle of these fabrics, along with other surprise goodies, will be given away to three lucky winners! Submit your EQ design featuring Leather and Lace and Amazing Grace…all instructions and contest details are in this post. Good luck! To enter In order to enter for the giveaway you must submit a quilt using the current Fabric of the Month AND comment on at least one other person’s quilt you like by the end of the month. If you’re the first person to submit

Welcome to our blog series, Do You EQ Too? Each month, we will spotlight a different EQ user and their quilts! If you haven’t already, you can read our introduction post here. This month we are spotlighting Heleen Pinkster! Heleen is a long-time EQ user who currently lives in the Netherlands, and actually translated the EQ8 Lessons for the Beginners book into Dutch! “I always introduce myself with the following words,” says Heleen. “I’m a daughter of an architectural draftsman and a needlework teacher. I studied for and worked as a primary school teacher. This all together makes me: Heleen. I have very good spatial awareness, I can ‘see’ my quilts before they are sewn. I still use my mom’s old iron, because it has no holes in the bottom. This is important for how I sew my patterns. I developed my own detailed way of sewing foundation piecing patterns. For templates I

For this month’s Design & Discover I was inspired by Margaret J. Miller’s Block Bender Quilts book, which uses irregular grids. Playing with irregular grids can return some fun and unexpected results. Let’s get started! The first and easiest way to do this is to use a layout from the Layout Library. Open EQ8 Click Design a quilt from scratch Click Libraries > Layout Library >Layouts by Style > Irregular Grids Click on Irregular Grids – 6 or Irregular Grids – 7. (In the example I used Irregular Grids – 7.) Click Edit to Quilt Worktable. Click the DESIGN tab > Block Tools > Set Block Experiment with different blocks and the effects they create. Remember holding down the Ctrl/Command key on your keyboard will set the block in each patch. Click Fabric Tools and recolor. It can really make a big difference! When you are done, click Add to

Do you work on more than one project at a time?  Do you start a project and get stuck and then move to another project?  Did you know you can save partial projects in EQ to return to later to complete?  EQ makes it easy to start and stop projects and return to them later to complete or edit. If I am not sure what I am going to design and I just want to practice, I create a special project file named ‘Practice”.  Everything that is just a thought I want to try out goes into this file until I have developed my design idea.  I can then go back to the original design and pull it out of the Practice file to create a specific project for it. Open your EQ8  When the splash screen opens, select the ‘new project’ icon and name the project  ‘Practice”.  Click ‘OK’

Welcome to the EQ8 Block Spotlight series! Each month we highlight a block from the EQ8 Block Library with a few design ideas. Then we want you to show us what you can do with the block. I hope these posts will inspire you to try something new! This month’s block: Flower Basket Where to find it: 01 Classic Pieced > Baskets (Traditional) Design ideas to get you started I used the Frame Block feature available in Create Serendipity to rotate and frame the block. Then I could set it in a horizontal layout and the basket would be pointing “up,” instead of angled to the side. If you’d like to simply add setting triangles to the four sides of a block (rather than a fancy frame), you could use the Tilt Block feature to rotate the block 45 degrees. My second quilt uses the On-Point Medallions-2 quilt from the