Behind the Mouse: The Electric Quilt Blog

Get ready for pure summertime fun! Piecing Palooza is a live, virtual event on June 29th for learning quilt piecing techniques and skills taught by expert instructors. Save your spot today for a day of playful piecing, exciting giveaways, and inspiration to fuel all your future projects. EQ’s Jenny Novinsky and Janice Frisch will be demoing Electric Quilt 8 (EQ8) and the new Judy Martin Log Cabins add-on at the event. Have a friend who wants to learn more about EQ8 before taking the plunge? Tell your quilty friends about this great opportunity to see EQ8 in action and ask questions from EQ staff members! Tell them to use code pp2eq8 to save $20 too! For those who already own EQ8, you’ll love the other classes available from excellent quilting instructors! The keynote speaker for the event is EQ user Shelley Cavanna of Cora’s Quilts. (Psst! You can find Shelley’s

          This post focuses on Beginner Basics for new EQ8 Users.  If you are new to EQ8, learning to save your design work is a big deal.  There is nothing more frustrating than designing a quilt block or quilt and then not being able to find it or thinking it has disappeared.  As I teach Beginner EQ8 classes across the country, I find Saving your Projects and Designs to be one of most important beginner basics to learn.  In this lesson, I am going to try to demystify projects and sketchbooks and how to save those precious designs. When you first open EQ8, it opens an UNNAMED project.  You can always tell the name of the project by looking in the top left for Windows and hovering on the top center for Mac.  It will say Untitled-EQ8. This is a fresh new Project with only default

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. We hope these posts will inspire you to try something new and expand your EQ skills! This month’s block: Nebraska Tulips Where to find it: 04 Classic Applique > Flowers On-Point Design ideas to get you started The colors in this block made me think of stained glass windows. So I paired the tulips with one of the stained glass blocks from the 03 Foundation Pieced > Stained Glass Blocks section of the library. What if you want to use this on-point block in a horizontal setting? The quickest way to add setting triangles to an on-point block is to use the Tilt Block option available in Serendipity. Add the new “tilted” block

Thank you to everyone who participated in May’s design challenge! Check out the wonderful entries we received here! Winners Two winners were selected randomly. Congratulations to…. Winner 1: Sonya Chinn Winner 2: Alice Hertel A Note from Heather Valentine Heather Valentine, the designer of this collection, has some words to share with all the participants! “Oh my goodness, I am absolutely floored by the incredible outpouring of creativity and imagination in your quilt design submissions! Seriously, each and every design is a work of art. It’s been such a joy to watch each quilt be submitted. Keep up the fantastic work my talented friends, because you’re rocking it! I look forward to following along and seeing your designs stitched up in Color Club.” – Heather Valentine  Honorable Mentions Don’t forget to look at all the amazing submissions to this challenge. Here are a few honorable mentions! More Chances to Win Vertex by QT Fabrics is June’s Fabric of

In November we announced that we’ve teamed up with the Quilts of Valor Foundation® (QOVF) for a special 8-month collaboration! Oh, how time flies when such special quilts are being highlighted, but you’ve still got 1 month to join this wonderful event! We’re requesting both an image of your EQ-software-QOV design and a picture of the accompanying finished Quilt of Valor®. For inspiration, be sure to view previous posts in this heartwarming series! Rachelle C. Rachelle Craig, of Rachelle Handmade, is a talented EQ designer and she has used those skills to create some striking QOV! Her design process is “very experimental and she usually tries many versions of a block before playing with the color palette” which EQ allows her to do easily. When Rachelle does finally play with colors, auditioning different patriotic colorways is also quick and fun using EQ software. Being involved in these projects and knowing that her designs may inspire someone to

EasyDraw is for pieced blocks. You can also use PolyDraw, or Applique. With EasyDraw all the lines must touch each other and/or the edges of the block. Think of your lines as seams. For example, in the first block the lines do not touch the edges.  The center pieces are “floating”. When you click the COLOR tab you won’t see the diamond. You couldn’t piece the first block, so you can’t draw it that way in EasyDraw either! In the second block, lines are added. Now, you could sew it, and it appears correctly on the COLOR tab. There are a few other things you want to consider BEFORE you start drawing your block: the block size and the precision bar settings. Block Size Let’s say you want to draw the log cabin block below and want the finished block to be 12 inches x 12 inches. If you analyze

June’s Fabric of the Month is Vertex by QT Fabrics, which is their newest blender collection! With an array of 84 colors, this textural print will become your go-to favorite. Select colors are also available in 108” wide fabric too. Ask your favorite independent quilt shop for Vertex and tell them QT Fabrics sent you! A bundle of these fabrics will be given away to three lucky winners! Submit your EQ design featuring Vertex below…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 a quilt, make sure to come back and comment on someone else’s quilt before the contest ends. Instructions for how to submit an image are at the