EQ8 Lessons with Yvonne

Welcome to DESIGN AND SEW ALONG 3-LESSONS WITH YVONNE.  This is lesson one (1) in this series that will focus on seasons and holidays in each of those seasons utilizing the EQ8 software. Not everyone celebrates holidays, so you will have the option of creating a seasonal block instead of a holiday block.  Not all countries celebrate the holidays at the same time.  For instance, Thanksgiving in Canada is in October, and in the USA it is celebrated in November.  You will design your blocks in plenty of time to be able to stitch them out before your holiday time. We will be making blocks that are all the same size so you will be able to put them together to make one large quilt or use them as blocks for smaller projects like bags, table runners, wall hangings, and quick gifts for others. The written lessons will appear each

Welcome to the newest series DESIGN AND SEW ALONG 3- LESSONS WITH YVONNE. These classes are designed for the EQ8 program.  In this series, we will be looking at the changing seasons and specifically exploring the holidays/events that occur during that season. Not every single holiday will be addressed; most will be holidays that are celebrated in North America and not necessarily worldwide.  We will be constructing blocks using different drawing methods and using the built-in blocks in EQ8 to create our unique blocks that express the seasons/holidays throughout the year.  Each lesson will have blocks being made of the same size so at the end of the DESIGN AND SEW ALONG 3–LESSONS WITH YVONNE you will be able to add all the blocks together to create an overall seasonal/holiday quilt.  Or, you can use the blocks each month to create placemats, table runners, fabric books, shopping bags, etc. to celebrate

EQ is a quilt design software but we can use it for more than quilt designs.  Have you ever considered making a cloth book for children celebrating different types of playtime?  You can easily accomplish this without sewing a single seam. Open your EQ8 and create a project name ‘Childs Eyeview of Lazy Days of Summer’.  Lazy days would include quiet play, reading, learning while playing, or making up songs and stories around simple images.  For very young children, all life is play! Confirm the name of the project is showing at the top of your screen. Click on the block worktable icon on the upper right corner of the screen. Click on BLOCK>New Block> Easy Draw at the upper left area above the worktable. At the top of the worktable enter a block size of 8 inches with snaps vertical and horizontal set at 32. Click on the line

  Welcome to  Design and Sew 2 Lessons with Yvonne.  This is lesson five (5) in this series and the last lesson of this series.  We will be looking at blocks and changing the EQ8 program/project settings to edit existing block drawings.  We will also continue working with unique layouts for quilts built into the program library.  Color plays a significant role in how we view the quilts and we will discover how to change the color settings in the EQ8 program. Be sure to watch the video at the end of the blog first to get a feel for how the lesson will be laid out.  A picture is worth a million words! We want to see what you have created in this series of lessons so be sure to add your comments and images of your layouts to the blog in the comments box at the bottom. Refer back

Welcome to Design and Sew 2 –Lessons with Yvonne.  This is lesson four (4) in the series.  In this lesson, we will highlight text and it’s applications in the EQ8 program.  Text can be used in so many different ways to enhance our quilts.  We will explore the use of text and how to make it a feature in your quilt designs.  We will also look at different fabrics and layout options as unique backgrounds for our text elements. The video for this lesson is at the bottom of the blog page.  I suggest you watch the video to start with and then do the written lesson after.  This way you will have a good idea as to how we are going to step through the lesson to create the quilt designs. A picture is worth a thousand words, and when creating different text styles in one layout it is easier

Welcome to Design and Sew 2 – Lessons with Yvonne.  This is lesson three (3) in this series. I hope you have enjoyed the first two lessons with this series.  We are continuing with creating quilts in the EQ8 program without having to draw our blocks.  There are thousands of blocks built into the program that we can use as they are or edit them slightly to create a block unique to us.  This is also true for quilt layouts.  There are many quilt layouts all ready for us to explore and add our unique touch to make them specific to us.  This is a stand-alone lesson and you do not have to do the first two lessons in the series to do this one.  However, we learn new tips and techniques in each lesson so you may want to try the lesson without doing any sewing of your designs

As crafting people, we rarely do only one type of craft.  Sewing, knitting, crocheting, painting, embroidery, photography, quilting, card making, and so much more are creative expressions of ourselves.  Working with fabrics is my first choice of creativity.  I love to work with fabrics, threads, designing, digitizing,  and piecing it all together to create one cohesive design. EQ8 is a quilt design program that uses graphics to help us ‘see’ how our actual project will look finished while still in the ‘virtual world’ of creativity.  As an educator for both machine embroidery and quilting, I can use my EQ8 to merge both of these creative loves of mine.  For those of you who still have EQ7 with the EQStitch add-on program, you can create embroidery directly in your program.  Everyone else uses another software program to create their embroidery.   Have you ever wondered why EQ has an embroidery library?  If