If you’ve ever used Wreathmaker and wanted to do more… here’s a technique I’ve used a lot to redraw the Quiltmaker blocks for the Quilting Designs series.

Pages 244-245 in the EQ6 User Manual describe the Ellipse tool a little bit.

  1. Add the Ellipse tool to your PatchDraw Appliqué toolbar.
  2. Drag out a big ellipse.
  3. Ensure its a perfect circle by typing in the size in the Precision Bar.
  4. Make the size the same size as your block.
  5. Change the ellipse style to “partition evenly into sections.”
  6. Set the number of times you want the design to be in the circle.
  7. Center the ellipse using the Precision bar button.
  8. If you don’t want it perfectly up and down you can rotate it some number of degrees (like 5 or 18.2… whatever you want).
  9. Make a second smaller perfect circle and center it.

Your block should look something like this now:

***EDIT*** On the Precision Bar, click Convert to Patch for both circles. (Or, go to the Color tab and back to the Applique tab to convert them both at the same time.)

Convert the whole thing to guides. And draw in one of the wedges. Make the line start and end on the smaller circle where it crosses the wedge line.

Then, write down the position (X, Y) and size (W, H) of the shape from the precision bar when the object is selected. Do this math:
Block Width – x – w = ??? x for new piece
Block Height – y – h = ??? y for new piece

Clone and rotate the shape 180 degrees. Type in the numbers you get for the position of the new piece. You should be able to Select All, and rotate and center to get the rest that go around the circle. The degree of rotation depends on how many wedges you have. I did 12 wedges (360/12=30), so once I have the the first set I can rotate the new cloned pairs 30 degrees until I complete the circle.

I know this is like …. super-duper-advanced PatchDraw, but I know if I don’t write it down now, I’ll forget.

Here are some other quilting stencils done with this same technique.

other stencil

other stencil