Behind the Mouse: The Electric Quilt Blog

Current Challenge: A Quilt for EQ the Mouse! Our favorite mouse and mascot, EQ, would love a quilt to call his own. He is small, gray and a bit vain about his looks. His favorite food is cheese. He lives in a box behind Penny’s computer monitor on her desk, and could definitely use a warm quilt. He edits the monthly EQ Newsletter. He has a Facebook page and loves his fans. His best friend is Jean Claude, a small brown mouse who lives in the Art History department of Bowling Green State University. He speaks French, but very poorly. Jean Claude is fluent.

Each month we have free fabrics available for download to add to your EQ5 or EQ6 program: http://www.electricquilt.com/Users/Downloads/palette.asp Sometimes people tell us what fabrics they want. Other times we make up the categories according to what ‘looks like fun.’ Don’t forget to have your voice heard. Vote for the fabrics you want and let us know what should be in the choices for the next month. (Otherwise Andrea might have to do another “Random Farm Animals” palette. Poor thing… she gets a little slap happy when she has too much to do and no one gives her any direction.) Feel free to leave comments to let us know which fabrics you’d like to see. Thanks!

We’re here at quilt market in Houston. It’s so great to meet all of these hard-working shop owners and talk to our longtime customers. So many familiar faces… and so many new ones too. Sample Spree was so much fun. It’s a chance for all the stores to buy all the new stuff the night before the show starts. We have Kaleidoscope Mystery Quilts hanging in our booth. They’re gorgeous. EQ the Mouse is lining up the next several newsletters and conducting interviews. He’s chatting it up with friends and posing for photos… although you can’t always see him because he’s so small. ; ) More to come… signing off for now…

You have only one month to win some of the over $22,000 in prizes offered in the Rose of Sharon EQ6 Block Challenge. See how to download an EQ6 project with pre-designed motifs and fabrics for making Rose of Sharon blocks. Entry deadline: November 15, 2009. Send your entry in now! You can send in as many blocks as you like. The more blocks you enter, the better your chances of winning.

The EQ Virtual and Actual Quilt Gallery is growing. You all are so talented. Thank you for sharing your stories and pictures. We have so many quilts to add yet! We will pass the 100 mark very soon. View the newest page of our gallery. If you would like to exhibit in the online gallery, here’s what we need sent to penny@electricquilt.com: EQ project (tell us which quilt it is in the Sketchbook) Photo of the entire finished quilt (not at an angle/as straight-on as possible, larger than 600 pixels, do not crop out the background, do not cut off the borders or binding in the picture) Quilt Title who gets the Credit? (designer, maker, quilter) Note or Story about the quilt your website or blog information (optional) We can’t wait to see what you’ve accomplished!

So this whole time we’ve been working with octagons…. want to go to the next step? How about hexagons, pentagons, and other polygon kaleidoscopes? Try Andrea’s lesson and see what you come up with: October – Endless Possibilities Don’t forget to keep those Kaleidoscope Mystery pictures coming!

Jean Boyd, one of our friends to the north, has been a longtime customer and avid EQ Printables user. She has even appeared on QNNtv talking about printing on fabric. Jean Boyd recently wrote in to say: “As you know I have been using your printable fabric sheets for many years but have not used the EQ program very much for my design work. Last August I was invited by Northcott Fabric to design a quilt for them using their new ‘Winter Sports‘ flannel fabric which is in stores now just in time for the 2010 Winter Olympics being held here in Canada. I designed one quilt using EQ and the Winter Sports fabrics and it worked so well that I became fascinated with the whole process. I continued to create more designs and was pleased to have Northcott choose 3 of my patterns. All the patterns have now been