Just Because

The Electric Quilt Company is a pretty small group and many of us crossover in our job duties. Whenever we would pass around a greeting card for all the employees to sign, Jan would always sign the card as “Jan-In Shipping” as if we could possibly be confused by any other “Jan.” Jan is a chatterbox of energy in our office who keeps us all in stitches (no pun intended) with her quick-witted one-liners or her Pig Latin conversations with Heidi. If you’ve ever called the “sales” line at Electric Quilt, you may have spoken with Jan. Jan lives just around the block from me and her daughters and my sons attended the same elementary school, junior high and high school. We attended school events together, chaperoned proms and so on for years. I think you’re a lucky person if you have friends at work who are also friends outside

Helen Rusch Phillips makes photo quilts…very special photo quilts. She says her goal is to “bring comfort”…and she does, in more ways than one. Helen says, “I taught myself how to print Photos on Fabric after losing my mother following her issues with Alzheimer’s. I saw what can be done for people dealing with memory issues in their waning years or memory loss due to injury/illness and bring relief to patients, family members or caregivers. My passion later grew to assist families with Veterans dealing with TBI/PTSD. And later yet to honor and remember our fallen heroes. It is an amazing experience to help families tell a story with their photos. I chose “Remembering Quilts” because it is a blend of what technology has to offer with the traditional warmth and caring of a family quilt. I started making the Remembering Flags before Memorial Day 2012 to bring a little

Barbara Brackman is a quilt historian and author. She has written books on quilting during the Civil War including Facts and Fabrications: Unraveling the History of Quilts and Slavery and Quilts From the Civil War. Her Encyclopedia of Pieced Quilt Patterns contains more than 4000 pieced quilt patterns, gathered from printed sources published between 1830 and 1970. (EQ’s BlockBase is based on Barbara Brackman’s Encyclopedia of Pieced Quilt Patterns.) She has many other books, including her newest, Emporia Rose: Applique Quilts. Barbara also has a free block weekly on her blog along with historical information and stories.   Barbara says, “I have been reading Jane Austen biographies for several years, trying to figure out what it was like to live in England about 1800. I realized how much Austen’s life and her family influenced her novels so I thought I’d do a block of the week in 2014 with a

I had a lot of fun using EQStitch and my embroidery machine to quilt my most recent project – a baby quilt. I saw a similar baby quilt on Pinterest and thought it would be the perfect project for quilting, block by block in the hoop, using my embroidery machine. I’m not totally sure why I thought this…because I thought it would be easy to find the center of a 4-inch square because it’s plain? Because I figured it would be a lot easier to handle the size of a baby quilt than something larger? Whatever the original thought, it turned out to be super easy AND super fun. If you like, you can download the EQStitch project or the EQ7 project and check it out. I assembled the top and the back and sprayed and pinned my quilt sandwich together. I was ready to start the quilting. Since I

One nice thing about EQ is trying out different options before deciding on a quilt! Here are 3 EQ versions and a real fabric version of the quilt. Which is your favorite? Either way, you can download the EQ7 project here, or the EQ8 project here. We have hundreds of free projects available as a way to thanks our users for buying our programs and as a way to show and teach what is possible with EQ products. *****There isn’t a non-EQ version available for this project. No PDFs are available. EQ7 or EQ8 are required to get this pattern.***** If this inspires you to make something, let us know! Email photos to Heidi@electricquilt.com.

    EQStitch user, Iris Dinter, has taken the block patterns 12 Funny Snowmen by Christiane Wipplinger and turned them into embroidery!   And, there are so many great block add ons for EQ7 that YOU could turn into embroidery, too!   What a great idea!

One of our very smart users, Jodie Witherell, recently emailed us with a great idea. Jodie used Sulky Soluble Stabilizer Fabri-Solvy to get her quilting stencil onto her quilt. Here is what she did: Jodie designed her quilt in EQ7. She used an eagle block from EQ7 as a stencil, simply by putting it on Layer 3 of the quilt. Did you know any block you place on Layer 3 of your quilt will show up as a stencil?   (Sometimes it’s better to turn the block into a motif for Layer 2 or 3. To do this you would open the block to the block worktable. Next, Select All > Copy. Then click Block > New Block > PatchDraw Motif > Paste > Add to Sketchbook. It will be on the Motifs tab of the Block palette.) After Jodie had her eagle just the way just wanted it, she