Behind the Mouse: The Electric Quilt Blog

We love the chance to spread news about our EQ Artists. Check out Marlene Oddie’s new book, “You can Quilt! Building Skills for Beginners.” I asked our good friend Marlene to tell us a little bit about the book, herself and her experience with EQ7. Read our Q&A below: EQ: Congratulations on the release of your new book, You Can Quilt! Building Skills for Beginners. Tell us about it! Marlene: The book is a great resource for learning skills and lots of great tips for a wide variety of piecing techniques and various shapes. It all started with Leila Gardunia’s Skill Builder Sampler Quilt-a-long (QAL) and her use of Rosie the Riveter for her QAL blog button. EQ: Before we discuss your experience with EQ7, tell us about yourself! Marlene: Engineer by education, project manager by profession, and now a quilter by passion. I had a career in financial services

This month’s FREE fabric download is from Andover’s Novelty Christmas collection. Download it now!

EQStitch is a “plug-in” for EQ7. EQStitch will convert your EQ7 to EQStitch. But don’t worry, EQStitch includes all the great features of EQ7. Once you’ve installed EQStitch once…if you want it (or EQ7) on additional or new computers, you’ll just need to install EQStitch. Even if it’s on a new computer that’s never had any EQ products on it…you just need to install EQStitch. Even is the computer that originally had EQStitch on it was destroyed, unplugged, given away, deactivated, or anything else…you just need to install EQStitch. Even if you have EQ7 Upgrade (or EQ6 Upgrade)…you just need to install EQStitch. If you have any questions, please contact tech support. Call 419-352-1134 or email techsupport@electricquilt.com. We are here  M-F, 9am-5pm EST.

Text fonts come in all shapes and sizes but not all fonts will stitch well.  Fonts can be letters or small icon shapes.  All fonts you have in your computers’ Font Folder on your hard drive will be available in the drop down menu in EQStitch.  Below are some tips for dealing with fonts in the EQStitch program. 1.  Just because the font is available in the fonts folder and can be accessed by EQStitch does not mean it will stitch well. 2.  The smaller the font size the harder it is to read when created with threads. 3.  Applique fonts need to be fairly large in order to incorporate the zigzag edge stitches without closing down the font shape. 4.  The approximate size on the properties bar when creating text is indeed approximate.  If you need an exact size of letter, you need to select it and then type

Understanding Activation and Deactivation EQ7  can be installed and activated unlimited times, but only 2 computers can be activated at one time. You can “turn on” and “turn off” activations to choose which computers you want to work on. Watch this Video Watch this video to learn more about the ACTIVATION PROCESS. You can use EQ7 on all of your computers, but you can only have 2 active at any one time. How many computers can I install EQ7 on? You can install EQ7 on as many computers as you want, however only 2 computers can be active at a time. If you want to use EQ7 on your laptop, but it’s already activated on your desktop and your work computer, you’ll need to deactivate on 1 computer before activating on your laptop. Again, activating and deactivating is a quick and simple process over the Internet. This diagram shows a

Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning or communication, as a guide to belief and action.  Simply put it means to plan ahead.  When digitizing we do this all the time.  Think of what type of design you want to create, the steps it will take to create the artwork, work from background to foreground, apply stitch properties and thread colors, and then sort the information before exporting it to become a stitch file for your embroidery machine.  Did you know you do all that when designing with your EQStitch? Sometimes it is just easier to let the auto digitizing functions of the program take over and think through all the steps for you.  But, when you rely on auto digitizing,  you lose the control to be creative yourself.  

The new issue of Modern Quilts Unlimited is out! You can find my article on page 86! It talks about how to make a simple diagonal striped block and make lots of different layouts and designs.                 There are also lots of ideas, tricks and tips included as well as a lesson. The lesson has step-by-step directions on how to make this adorable Cat Chevron Quilt! There is also an EQ7 file (opens a PDF that includes a link to the EQ7 project) to download with the Cat Chevron quilt and all the following quilts (and more)  included! I hope you like it!