No surprises here

An ironic side effect of using EQ to design your quilts:  Remember when you didn't have a way to visualize your designs other than perhaps graph paper sketches?  Remember when you started to join your blocks together and got your first glimpse of the completed quilt design, and what a kick it was, watching your quilt come to life.

Well, with EQ, it can be a case of "been there, done that".  Unfortunately.  Here's an example:

An EQ generated image of the quilt I made for a Christmas present:

An actual photo of the quilt: 

See what I mean?  Definitely no surprises there.  Of course, the possibility of making a complete dog of a quilt has been vastly diminished, but after you draw and visualize the quilt, actually making it may become anti-climactic.

In some ways, the thrill is gone.

This is a little sad.

What I just tripped over - er, found

Under the heading of "if it were a snake it would have bit me", I just stumbled on the fact that the Connecting Threads company website has EQ6/EQ7 compatible downloads of their current fabric offerings, which integrate seamlessly into your EQ fabric libraries.

Wow!

I love it! I just downloaded the fabrics for one of their groups that I just ordered and colored the EQ design I had planned for them with the actual fabrics I will use. This is spectacular.

I have been muttering to myself about why don't the fabric companies do this so you can design in EQ with their new collections. Now I find that Connecting Threads has already accomplished it. Have any other fabric companies done this too? Am I just out of the loop?

I would love to know if anyone can tell me.

EQ6 is deeply cool!

The above image was created from EQ6 using imported images of fabrics from the webstore Thousands of Bolts. (This, by the way, is one of my favorite places to shop on the web. Just be sure you have plenty of time to browse - their stock is LARGE. And discounted!)

I originally drew this using sketchbook fabrics in EQ6 similar to those I posted Wednesday. After I assembled that pile of fabrics I was trying to decide whether to use them on this project or on the new Quiltville mystery. I was aiming for "not brown" to please my husband. This pattern, by the way, is taken from a Connecting Threads kit. It has a traditional name but I can't remember it, although I've seen it before. I made a navy/wine/brown/neutral version about which my husband said he liked the blocks but not the colors. So, I sketched it using blue/navy/gold/orange. That got the thumbs up.

I browsed Thousands of Bolts this morning while waiting to leave for a doctor's appointment. They had some lovely batiks with dark and light blue backgrounds, an orange monotone batik, and a gold with blue and rust flecks. So, I decided to splurge (if $4.50 a yard for batiks is considered a splurge) and ordered the fabric to make a quilt for my husband.

Here's where the EQ6 coolness comes in: I copied the fabric samples from the web store and imported them into my sketchbook in EQ, so I could color my layout with exactly the fabrics I will use. I have a few quibbles: the light and dark blue pieces have more visible yellow and orange swirls in the batik and aren't as gray as the imported images look, but generally it's pretty accurate. Know before you sew - I love it!

You all probably already knew about this, but I hadn't tried it yet, so allow me my moment of Yippee!

By the way, as I looked at this quilt with light and dark blue, gold and orange, I decided to name it "Kentucky Girl Moves to Tennessee". Blue for University of Kentucky colors, Orange for University of Tennessee, and blue and gold for University of Tennessee-Chattanooga.

EQ part 2

Here's another one: Like the first, the fabrics aren't the actual ones, and the colors aren't exactly right, but it gives you an idea what the quilt will look like. The prints will be toiles from the Michael Miller "Kid Toile"line, with this one for the large print: Ooh, the color's a little off there, but the background is sage and the toile is chocolate and cream. The borders will be a sage/chocolate check, the background of the blocks a cream/chocolate open toile, and the points of the stars a brown marble and a sage/cream dot.

I bought that toile a while ago because I fell in love with it but couldn't figure out what to do with it. I saw a few designs that set me in this direction, and now it has a purpose and will work out quite well. I know you all do this too: buy a fabric because you HAVE to have it, but then it sits there on the shelf, mocking you, because it won't fit in any designs. Well, if you don't do it you're a better person than I.

I can see right now that EQ6 is going to be very dangerous. I can already think of ten times more quilts than I have time to sew, but now I can draw them, in color no less, and taunt myself with them.

Woo Hoo, it's EQ!

OK, I'm embarrassed. I got EQ6 for Christmas, but with all the gift quilt sewing, wedding attending, doctor's appointments, etc. that was going on, I never loaded it on the computer. Until yesterday. And once I got past the Vista crankiness, it went well.

Now comes the learning curve. You see, I had Electric Quilt back in, oh, 1989, when it was still DOS based. I used it some, but it had quirks and was not easy to use without a mouse, so I just let it slide when we upgraded computers and never thought about it again.

Last Christmas, while casting around for gift ideas to fulfill my husband's requested "What I would like" list, I thought about the new EQ and that maybe it would be good for auditioning ideas. (I was using the draw function on Word, which is surprisingly effective, but not optimal.)

So, I asked, he bought, and it went on my desk to be installed. Then life intervened. So, yesterday I looked at the box (again) and said "Let's get this thing on the computer while the laundry is being done."

To put it mildly, it's improved. I made up a few designs without ever looking at the manual. I wouldn't call it intuitive, but once you wrap your brain around its world-view (which, I admit, is hard if you've been using drafting or other drawing programs, because it doesn't work AT ALL like those) you can whip out stuff in the blink of an eye.

Take this little example:
This is the "Raspberry Truffle" pattern from the May/June issue of Quiltmaker. Now, they made it in pink and brown, but I've made enough pink and brown quilts for a lifetime and I wanted to see what it would look like in another colorway. They also made a variation in the French Farmhouse line by Renee Nanneman for Andover Fabrics. It was love at first sight.

Cool, huh?

I'm going to call it "Blueberry Pie with a Lime Twist".

That little mock-up only took me about an hour, and that includes poking the wrong buttons and fussing.

I'm going to enjoy this. (But I gotta read the manual.)