Behind the Mouse: The Electric Quilt Blog

We’ve had a lot of questions about Lone Star quilts in techsupport recently. For those of you who have not seen this technique yet, pay attention to the fastest Lone Star you’ll ever make (virtually). In the LIBRARIES > Layout Library > Basics by Style, get the first layout in “Stars” and add it to your Sketchbook. Get some blocks from the Block Library or draw them yourself. (Four Patch, Nine Patch, Sixteen Patch, etc.) Edit the quilt from the Sketchbook, set the blocks in the diamond spaces. If you’re chicken like me when it comes to partial seams and Y-seams, set Half Square Triangles in the setting triangles, so each part simplifies down to triangles in squares. This works for all sorts of blocks. Remember, if it was foundation-pieceable as one unit (like a Diamond in the Square) when it was square… it will still be foundation-pieceable as one

We started another contest! This one ends August 31, 2008. EQ the Mouse hid himself all over the www.electricquilt.com web site. Go find as many as you can and send in your answer. Those with the highest correct answer will have their names put in a hat for the prize drawing. Everyone who enters will receive a free EQ5 or EQ6 project with some cool new blocks, quilts, and fabrics. View the complete contest rules and how to enter Enjoy!

In this month’s issue of Fons and Porter’s Love of Quilting you will find Sue Spargo’s Aimee Rabbit Pin Keeper project from the software program, Sue Spargo’s Folk Art Dreams. Such a cute project! Sue completed this special pin keeper especially for Love of Quilting in these beautiful springy colors! We just love Sue’s work and are overjoyed to see them published so beautifully. Get connected with Sue on her blog to hear more about her work and her life.

Vanessa Wedding wrote to say: EQ6 is the best mother’s day gift I’ve had in eons! I use it to post and sell the quilt patterns I’ve designed on my blog. Check out two of Vanessa’s cool ideas on her blog: Golden Glow Block – how color can change a design Cherry Blossom – making a 5-petal pieced flower If you use EQ for your blog, email me at webmaster@electricquilt.com and tell me about it.

Recently, a few projects completed by our own Andrea Bishop were published in Fabric Trends magazine using our printable fabrics! Here are her adorable photo purse and pillow as they appeared in the magazine: From the June/July issue of Fabric Trends. Andrea printed 25-30 2.5″ x 2.5″ squares of assorted, tightly cropped images onto our printable fabrics. She then cut them apart using a rotary cutter and re-arranged them to be sewn together into her pillow or purse! So cute. If the thought of sewing together tiny squares scares you away from a project like this, try arranging your photo squares, as you want them, side-by-side in a photo editing software such as Photoshop. Then print the solid image onto EQ printable fabric. Trim away the surrounding fabric and sew your single finished photo collage right into your pillow or purse! Talk about easy! This is a really fun project

So, I’ve always wanted to draw a tessellation. They are so cool the way they interlock and look like animals sometimes. I never thought I was creative enough to figure it out and draw it. Then I had an “Aha!” moment. I’m still not anywhere close to M.C. Escher artwork, but, I’ve figured out something fun in EQ6 I thought I’d share. A tessellation is easy if you start with a square and what you subtract from one side you add to the other. This is a silly way to do it, but start a new PatchDraw Block. On the Pieced tab, fill the block with half-square triangles. (My block is 10×10 and I kept only 6×6 in the center.) With the Pick tool, move a triangle from one side of the block to the other. Keep going until you’ve moved as much as you want. Stop if you think

M. Mercedes Silva wrote in to show one of her virtual ClubEQ designs that made it into fabric reality. Check out Mercedes’ original ClubEQ quilt “Firework”: Mercedes wrote: “Our guild had a fabric challenge (Robert Kaufman,”The fire within II’ D#6040), so I made the quilt from ClubEQ January 2007 #28. I did strip piecing, but it was not easy. I wish that I had done paper piecing instead. Well it is done now and my husband likes it very much, so much that he wanted in his office. Thanks for this wonderful program! Happy Quilting!” Finished quilt by Mercedes: You can see how the two have totally different effects when you flip-flop the lights and darks. I really like the way it turned out. So much piecing! Great job Mercedes!