Behind the Mouse: The Electric Quilt Blog

With the last mystery quilt “Skylights“, members of the Heritage Quilt Guild, from Athens, Tennessee actually followed along and sewed finished quilts. (NO PEEKING IF YOU HAVEN’T DONE THE MYSTERY!) If anyone is sewing along for the current mystery “EQuinox” or the Mystery Project for Kaleidoscope Collectors… let us know! We’d love to start another gallery showing finished quilts! Email webmaster@electricquilt.com with your name and the photo of the finished quilt. Thanks!

6) How do I design a quilt back to go with the front of my quilt? This one is fun. I recommend trying out a Horizontal or Vertical Strip Quilt for this. Here’s the front of my quilt: If I make note of the finished size in the bottom corner of my screen, I know exactly how big to make the back. So click QUILT > New Quilt > Vertical Strip Quilt. Go to the Borders tab and delete off the border. On the Layout tab, change the width of the strips and add any strips as necessary. Play with the “clone” feature to speed up your design. You can do plain strips or set the strip style to Plain Blocks if you want to do more detail. You want to make the size of this quilt the same dimensions as the front measurements you wrote down. Color the back

5) How do I make a stencil for a specific block? This is actually a really cool technique. 1) Edit the block to the worktable. Make note of the block size. (Mine is a 5×5.) 2) Click FILE > Export Image. 3) Save the file on your Desktop (you can delete it later). 4) Click BLOCK > New Block > PatchDraw Motif. 5) Click BLOCK > Import Image for Tracing. 6) Import in the image you saved in step 3. 7) Draw on top of it. Here are some stencils I made to go with my 5-Patch. Tip: I recommend making your stencil the same size as your block. For some of the examples I started with a Quiltmaker Quilting Design (which edits down to a specific size). It makes the math really easy if I take my 9″ stencil and just change the size to 5″, so that I

Not too long ago we got a phone call from Sherry, the editor of the very first Irish quilt magazine! She was pioneering the magazine and wanted to know if we might want to contribute a quilt project. Better yet, Sherry told us the contributed quilts were going to photograph the quilts in Ireland natural settings. Stunning! We were so delighted to get to be a part of the magazine’s debut so of course we participated. We had a beautiful 24″ x 24″, purple and green that incorporated photos of a fern plant printed onto our EQ printable fabrics (you might remember this quilt from previous blog posts in June and July ). We called it the Fern Quilt. It seemed to be the perfect colors and theme for Ireland’s landscape and we couldn’t wait to see the photos. We got to meet Sherry in Houston and she told us that

EQ6 D. Kathy Willis who lives just North of Houston, made it through three weeks without electricity following Hurricane Ike. What bothered her most? Was it losing a beautiful shade tree, or all the food in her freezer, or going without lights and air conditioning in Houston’s heat? Nope. Kathy surprised us by writing: “You’ll laugh when you learn that throughout the ordeal, I was concerned that I wouldn’t be able to participate in your monthly Club EQ Challenge. (Gotta participate to get the files!) Each time our son was able to get through to us (the land line was out and the cell phones worked sporadically), he’d let me know whether Barb had posted a new topic. I’d breathe a sigh of relief every time he told me “Postcards” was still the current challenge, and then he’d rib me about my priorities. He got so used to checking your

Here’s a lesson on drawing a foundation pieceable Santa and editing an existing appliqué Santa to give him a bag full of goodies: http://www.electricquilt.com/Users/FunStuff/Lessons/03/0312/LOM0312.asp

When we were in Houston we got to meet two women, Marcea Owen and Janice Liljenquist, who own Abbey Lane Quilts. They came to see us at Sample Spree and with much excitement told us all about how much they love EQ6 (so flattered) and about how their business with works with EQ6 and we were very impressed! Marcea and Janice are quilt designers who create all of their quilts in the EQ program. They’ve been quilting together for 15 years and just a year ago decided to establish Abby Lane Quilts. Their business designs quilts for people and fabric designers all over the country. They sell their original patterns and projects in their online store. They work together to create these designs in EQ6 and the craziest part is that they don’t even live in the same town! Marcea and Janice live in Florida and Texas but transfer their EQ6 files via email to colaberate