Behind the Mouse: The Electric Quilt Blog

Chris Willis shared with us her vintage photo cards she made with our printable fabrics. Here are her instructions: For those who are computer savvy, you can tint black and white photos using your imaging software and print them out in color on EQ Printables. But if you’d rather spend less time mouse-ing and more time creating, it’s fun and easy to tint black and white fabric photos by hand. step 1: Scan a vintage black and white photo, or use your favorite imaging software to remove the color from a more recent photo. step 2: Print your images onto EQ printable fabric, four to a sheet for postcards. (The Premium Cotton Satin and Lawn have worked best.) step 3: Rinse as directed before using wet media to tint. step 4: Apply fusible web to the back of your image sheet then carefully cut the image away from its background.

Only 12 days left to our “EQ The Mouse Hunt” contest. Everyone who enters gets a free project… so even if you just find one mouse you should enter. Winners will be chosen September 2, 2008. See how to enter on the mouse hunt page.

EQ Co-op Jenny Joseph, Sara’s mother-in-law Denise & Sara Baby Woodward is almost here! Only a few more months now and we’ll have yet another addition to the EQ family. In honor of her upcoming arrival, we threw a shower for Sara and we sure had fun together! Lots of pink and brown onesies with fashionable ruffles and skirts had us all “oohhing” and ahhhing” all evening and a couple silly games kept us laughing. We all shared our own signature dishes for an upscale pot luck dinner and enjoyed the perfect weather on the patio. There were some special guests at the party too; Heidi Kory’s little one, Derek, and the Seuberling Twins, Ben and Aly! Sara got some great practice time in All-in-all it was a wonderful celebration for Sara and her soon-to-be little one. Margaret made a cute quilt with scalloped edges for Sara There’s no better

I’m always amazed to see what quilters are capable of when designing in EQ. The artistic talent and attention to detail just “wows” me. Georgeta from Romania is one of those quilters. These are photos of her EQ designed trapunto quilt titled, “Dancing Feathers”. “I chose to put under organza a light color fabric rather than a bold one. Maybe a bold and bright fabric shows up the trapunto pattern more clearly more clearly but I still chose to use a light green fabric. I am very pleased with the final appearance of the quilt. I love the subtle and smooth transitions between batting and background.” See more of Georgeta’s work on her blog.

For those of you who are computer savvy and love to use keyboard shortcuts, I found an EQ6 archived blog post from Feed Dog you might be interested in. Feed Dog has assembled a list of keyboard commands you could use for the EQ6 program. To do this, you must first download the AutoHotKey software (as you’ll read). The Electric Quilt Company can’t tech support AutoHotKey programming, but we thought we’d pass on the tip for those of you who want to give it a try. “Sure, there are some key commands (the help file and tips of the day list some), but it’s hard to keep straight what the Ctrl key does when you’re drawing a Bezier curve (turns it into a line segment), drawing a rectangle (makes it a square), or coloring a one-patch quilt (colors a whole line of patches). But I wanted the to poke keys

Myra Harder and Cori Derksen of Blue Meadow Designs just told us about this really cool contest they’re holding and it’s totally worth checking out. Basically, they want you to submit your unfinished quilt projects where upon they will choose one as the winner. That quilt will be changed, finished, and returned to the owner with a fresh look! How cool is that!? Here’s the explanation from their site: The Concept In the back of closets, hidden deep in drawers and tucked away from everyone’s sight, are unfinished projects that have gone horribly wrong. We all have them (Myra has a drawer full) and we all wish that they would go away. They seem like such a waste. These projects were once exciting and you were eager to dive in, finish and display them with pride. However…they went wrong and now when you come across them in your closet you

We recently received an email from Sarah Smith, known quilt artist, blogger, and published contributor to popular quilting magazine’s to name a few. She’s read a review copy of Gloria Hansen’s new book Digital Essentials and had plenty to say about it! “I just got a copy of it for review, and OMG…. I can’t imagine knowing even a fraction of what went into this book, but boy am a glad Gloria wrote it! I’ll do a full review on my blog next week when I’m back from teaching in Lowell, but having looked at the book already, all I can say is BUY IT! (Preferably from Gloria as royalties on books are not huge, so she gets some income from sales, but no matter what from someone! She’ll have it on her website in September.) The books is astonishing in its depth and scope, but it is nevertheless clearly