Behind the Mouse: The Electric Quilt Blog

We wanted to share another Digital Essentials review this time from Machine Quilting Unlimited magazine: Digital Essentials – The quilt makers must-have guide to images, files, and more! …After definitions, Gloria explains how to enlarge, straighten, adjust the color or even change or eliminate the background of your digital quilt photos. She gives explicit instructions for working with each software program, and illustrations include computer screen shots and drop down menus as she walks you through each task in a direct, step-by-step, fashion. Side by side photos showing the results of adjusting such settings as saturation, sharpen and brightness are found throughout the book.ce. Whether you want to use your images to simply print, print on fabric, combine images, prepare a Power Point presentation, upload you quilt photos to a website or create image sizes which conform to the requirements for quilt show entries, Digital Essentials has the answer. There

Download this pretty quilt project for your EQ6 compliments of Carol Clasper’s blog. Here’s the post where she’s made the download available.

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