Learning EQ7

I recently bought EQ7, as I'm interested in writing patterns. If you haven't heard of it, it's a computer program to design quilts. I watched one video tutorial, then wanted to get right to designing! I'm impatient, I tell you. The impetus for buying it was to write a pattern for my Jewel Burst quilt. But, well, I hadn't taken detailed enough notes and I wasn't sure where to start and there was a new quilt to design... so I figured it would do another quilt first. I started a few different quilts before realizing I needed to skip the traditional layouts and go straight to custom. There would be time to learn those later. It took some reading of the manual, using the help menu and getting tips from other users, but I started to figure it out.

Learning that the usual Mac shortcut keys (such as copy and paste) worked the same made it much easier. As did learning how to make blocks, flip and rotate and align. So far, I've finished a pattern for one quilt. And then realized how much fun and easy it was to try out different colour combinations in the blocks! Which gave my one pattern a dozen or more variations that completely change its look. I'm working on sewing up the original quilt now and have a couple other people testing my pattern out to see how it works. I'm hoping to release the pattern in July.

I'd like to keep the quilt a secret for once, but here are a few scenes from the sewing space:

Pinning some parallelograms on my bed

Fabric pinned and stacked, ready to sew

Supervising from her blanket

Blues and browns

Being a good girl, staying on her blanket and off my quilt!

Quilting and cat photos! Good thing this is on my sewing blog and not Facebook - people might start un-friending me!