Behind the Mouse: The Electric Quilt Blog

Thanks to everyone who submitted blocks for the super-secret present for Barb Vlack. We wanted to celebrate the community ClubEQ created and celebrate the hard work of Barb Vlack, our ClubEQ challenge leader. Some of you may not know she’s not an EQ employee. She was one of our first customers. She’s been doing ClubEQ and techsupporting Info-EQ & our forums for free and for the fun of it all these years. In ClubEQ there are over 9000 of your quilts to show for all that hard work. Here at EQ, we decided to organize a secret quilt for her as a way of saying thanks for all she’s done. We wanted this to be a surprise that we would spring on her at Quilt Festival. Here’s the quilt: Here’s the label: As you can see by her smile in the next post. She was overjoyed by the result. Thanks

Barb Vlack was surprised! When we saw Barb during Quilt Festival in Houston last week we presented her with a sampler quilt with blocks made by users from all over the world: England, Germany, New Zealand, South Africa, France, Canda & the U.S. The quilt celebrates Barb’s 10 year anniversary (!) as clubEQ challenge leader — ten years of thinking up interesting challenges, and ten years of designing quilts to illustrate her challenge idea. Thanks so much for your clubEQ leadership Barb — lots of work, lots of challenging ideas to help EQ users learn new tricks and techniques, and lots of fun seeing what you’ll come up with each month!

Find the mouse and his pumpkin on www.electricquilt.com. Send the link of the page you found it on to penny@electricquilt.com today for a chance to win a copy of the book Blending Photos with Fabric 2 by Mary Ellen Kranz. We will pick the winner tomorrow morning.

You can make your own holiday cards using EQ6! Download this free EQ6 quilt project to be your card template. Swap out the block using the Set Block tool for one from the library or one that you draw yourself. Print on heavyweight paper and simply fold the 8-1/2″ x 11″ paper into quarters. You can buy envelopes in large quantities from your local office supply store. The ones that are about 4-3/8″ x 5-3/4″ will fit the folded cards with a little wiggle room. Like the card idea? How about gift tags too?! Print as Many as fit can help you there. Just select the block, and print “showing fabrics.” If you make your block size small (like 2 inches) and put a check next to “print as many as fit” on the Options tab, you’ll get a whole page of gift cards you can cut out. You can

The 35th annual Quilt Market & Festival in Houston finished on Sunday at 5pm. It was a long two weeks, but your excitement and awe kept us going (as did Barb Vlacks’ secret stash of homemade Marshmallows). We saw a lot of familiar faces and a lot of new ones. As always, it was fun talking with friends, fellow vendors, teachers, authors, fabric designers, publishers, TV hosts, EQ fans, and new customers. We were so excited to see how many of you brought printouts and flyers by our booth to show off what you made in EQ. We can’t wait to blog about your design adventures and successes. We bonded with a few, fellow Ohioans and joked with them whenever we walked by their booths. Marcia Derse is an artist out of the Toledo area (just north of us) and has a new fabric line from Troy Fabrics. Penny couldn’t

A few months ago, Patricia Rhudy wrote in to say: “Just had to send you a note to tell you how much I love my EQ software. We are getting ready to celebrate our 30th anniversary this year, so of course I have been designing a quilt for the celebration. I was thinking that I wanted to make a quilt with 30 blocks that would have pictures highlighting special occasions from the last 30 years. I love the feature of adding a photo to any layer of my quilt because it helps me to determine what size the photos should be. When my husband asked me what I wanted for our anniversary, I told him that I wanted something that he made. I knew that I wanted to make him a special quilt. I will send you a picture when I complete the quilt.” Anniversaries are special, especially when you

If you read our newsletter, you’re probably familiar with Glynis Thompson. She has a blog too where she posts daily EQ designs. Check out some of Glynis’s latest work. Glynis made this free Waterlily Lattice Project to share for personal use: Download the EQ5 project. Download the EQ6 project. Thanks Glynis! I know our users will appreciate the free project.