Behind the Mouse: The Electric Quilt Blog

Marjorie Rhine is a pattern editor for American Quilter magazine. The September issue has one of her very lovely and autumnal quilts (designed in EQ6, of course!) called “Chevron Star Rings“. Marjorie wanted the look of curved pieces without actually having to sew curved seams… a very common problem! She solved the issue, starting with a Double Wedding Ring block as a base and used EQ6 to adapt the block and to get a block exactly the way she wanted. Even looking at the quilt and knowing the seams aren’t curved doesn’t change the effect it has. You would not know there are no curves, great job! EQ6 design Marjorie explains how she used EQ6 to get the curved look: “I started with a traditional double-wedding ring block from Electric Quilt. I did a ‘convert to guides’ then started drawing straight lines over the curved lines until I came up

Have you heard of Blue Meadow Designs? Cori Derksen and Myra Harder are long time friends who started a freelance quilt design business together some years ago called Blue Meadow Designs (check out their blog while their new website is under construction). We found one of their quilts in American Patchwork and Quilting October issue called, “Ahead of the Curve”. We discovered it was designed in EQ6 and wanted to share it with you here too. One really cool thing about Blue Meadow Designs is that they create 99% of their patterns in EQ6! We feel so honored! These women enjoy the freedom of designing both traditional and modern quilts and projects for their clients and customers. Their patterns are beautiful and usually sparkling with charm and color. So how does EQ help them design better? Cori and Myra walked us through their process of designing in a really fun way! We got to

So I visited the vendor mall for a while. I got to this booth that was an absolute color explosion. I think it was the Material Girl shop I loved it. Everything was Westminster, FreeSpirit, and Art Gallery fabrics. I was staring at this quilt they had on their wall thinking “oh my, that’s a lot of piecing and appliqué.” And then I got closer and realized… “no…. that’s just plain squares! I can totally do that!” I asked them about the fabric, and of course they had half-yard cuts that they showed me off the rack. For those of you who want to try something similar, these Westminster fabrics would work for the plain squares: Start a horizontal quilt. Set these in the plain squares alternately (ALT). Then set something super-simple in the other alternate blocks (ALT)… like a Log Cabin (with really thick logs), or a 4-X block,

That night I realized just how large the Nebraska State Quilt Guild really was. I don’t know the total number in attendance, but it had to be between 400 and 600. A guild! A guild with that many people! Wow! Dinner was nice. I asked who the keynote speaker was that night. Someone said “Cathy Miller… she’s singing tonight… and tomorrow she’s teaching a Reverse Appliqué class.” Oooh… multi-talented, I thought to myself. Then I thought… oh no… singing. My dad is a professional opera singer/voice teacher. I remember sitting under the grand piano in his office with my coloring book (staying really quiet) when I was little, listening to all the bad singers become good ones. My poker face when it comes to music is non-existent. I hoped that tonight’s concert would be amazing so I could be amazed. Cathy Miller did not disappoint. She was AWESOME. Cathy is

NEW “GUESS DEAN’S BIRTHDAY” CONTEST Guess company President Dean Neumann’s birthday month and day. The 5 who come closest to the date will win their choice of one of our Quilting Designs CDs. If more than 5 guess the exact date, we’ll draw for 5 winners. One email guess per person. Send an email To: penny@electricquilt.com Subject: Dean’s Date Contest Body: the month and day you are guessing Entry deadline: August 20, 2009

I’m working on Quiltmaker 7 right now and feel like I have been drawing stencils for the last 2 years straight. I thought it would be fun to count how many I’ve traced from the Quiltmaker Quilting Motifs books… in the hopes that seeing the thousands behind me would help me get through the next 300. What is the Quiltmaker series you ask? Well, it’s this awesome little program that lets you print quilting stencils in any size. Volumes 3-7 even have videos to help you see how to mark your quilt. It ties into EQ6′s Block Library if you have it, so you can set all these beauties on your quilts to see what they look like with the design you’re planning. How many stencils are there? All of the volumes have different blocks. Here’s a run down of the categories and numbers for each: Volume 1 – 553

The new ClubEQ challenge is up and ready for your entries. This one is great because you can design any quilt you like… you just need to pick fun fabrics that work well with rotate or fussy cut. Think border prints & geometrics & focal prints. Challenge: Rotate and Fussy Cut! Design a quilt to show off fabrics that you can rotate and fussy cut. Use add-on tools for the quilt worktable Design Toolbar to rotate the fabric by varying degrees and fussy cut to position fabric motifs in a special arrangement. IMPORTANT: Please let us know if you use inches or centimeters to design your quilts this month. It will affect the scaling of the design when we go to put it in the Album. You can add “in” or “cm” to your project name and/or put it in the email to let us know. Due Date: Monday, August