Behind the Mouse: The Electric Quilt Blog

Welcome to the EQ8 Block Spotlight series! Each month we highlight a block from the EQ8 Block Library with a few design ideas. Then we want YOU to show us what you can do with the block. Let’s get creative! This month’s block: Sunburst and Mills Where to find it: 01 Classic Pieced > Lone Stars A few design ideas to get you started It’s December, so I had to do a Christmas quilt, right? I colored the block to accentuate the pinwheels in the corners. The holly and berries motif is set on Layer 2 for the border. My second quilt was created using a Custom Set layout. I offset the blocks so I could set a square-in-a-square block to line up with the flying geese in the corners of the Sunburst block. I used one of my all-time favorite collections, Terrain by Kate Spain, to color the quilt.

By now, you’ve probably seen many of Nancy Mahoney’s beautiful quilts in magazines. (If you haven’t, check out some photos we took here.) Her designs are just stunning. Did you know they were all created with Electric Quilt software? (At least the ones dating back to the mid-90s!) Below, Nancy tells us about her first quilt she ever made and how EQ came into play a few years later. First, a little about Nancy: Nancy has enjoyed making quilts for over 35 years, during which time an impressive range of her beautiful quilts have been featured in over 200 quilt magazines. She has also created over 100 quilt patterns for a variety of fabric manufacturers. Nancy has authored 14 books since 2002; her most recent book is Learn to Paper Piece. She has designed 15 fabric collections, including eight 30s reproduction collections. When she’s not designing and making quilts, Nancy

Du nouveau! Des livres en français pour EQ! EQ8 has enthusiastic users around the world! Did you know that the EQ8 User Manual and EQ8 Lessons for Beginners books are available in other languages? We are excited to share with you the translations provided by EQ8 users in the languages below. Spanish Translation Available (Traducción al español disponible) Lessons for Beginners in Spanish, or Lecciones para Principiantes, was translated by Marga Jackson, but it was completed thanks to the collaboration of her namesake Margarita Gutierrez, the person who prompted her to translate the book. Marga has tried to keep the soul of the design of the original edition, whilst constantly having to create more room for the extra lengthy Spanish words! She has also kept the English words that were necessary to keep the flow of work in English, and added a small booklet, included with the book, that contains

Borders can add so much to a quilt! We’ve covered using the Border tab and Auto Borders but these quilts are a little bit different. These are the two quilts we will be designing in this lesson. If you’d like to skip to the scalloped border go to step #41. Pointed Border Click NEW QUILT > Horizontal > LAYOUT tab Make the NUMBER OF BLOCKS: Horizontal: 1 Vertical: 5 Make the FINISHED SIZE OF BLOCKS Width: 12 Height: 12 Make the FINISHED SIZE OF SASHING Width: 0 Height: 1 Click the BORDERS tab Click the Add button two times or until you have three borders. Click on the first border and make it: Long Horizontal Left: 1 Top: 0 Right: 1 Bottom: 0 Click on the second border and make it: Long Horizontal Left: 2 Top: 0 Right: 2 Bottom: 0 Click on the third border and make it: Long

EQ Ambassador, Alyce Blyth has a brand new book out called Mini Masterpieces which would make a great gift (even for yourself!!). Read all about it below and enter to win a copy! EQ: Hi and welcome back to the EQ blog! Earlier this year, you told us you were headed to Bali – tell us how that was!! Alyce: Thank you! It was such a wonderful way to celebrate our wedding anniversary, and the longest my husband and I have been away just us two since we’ve had kids. And seeing as my eldest just turned 10, it’s been a long time coming. While we aren’t the most touristy of tourists (preferring to check out what a local supermarket is like over a busy tourist hot spot), we did hit up a few places, including one very fancy fabric store we happened across, before jumping in the pool each

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This lesson is all about adding stencils to your quilt.  Stencils are the drawings that show the quilting lines on your quilt. You may want to audition different stencils to decide how you might want to quilt your design and to help you figure out what approach you will take when quilting. You can have stencils that go over individual blocks or you can create a stencil that goes over an entire sections of your quilt. For this lesson, I will show you how I quilted the Anchor’s Away quilt from the last lesson.  If you haven’t completed that lesson, you can find it HERE. First, lets talk about the layers of a quilt.  When you are on the Quilt Worktable, you will see three tabs at the bottom of the screen. Layer 1 This layer is made up of pieced or applique blocks that are stitched together to make