Friday Fun in EQ7

I've been too busy with family and friends to blog this week but today I'm back with an insight into how I use Electric Quilt to plan projects. You may remember these blocks I made in July. I'm afraid the quilt got put aside for a little while as I had to have a big tidy up to convert my sewing room back into a bedroom for guests. Now everything is back to normal and I'm ready to resume.

The quilt is intended for our sofa and I wanted it the exact size to cover the seats. I started planning in EQ7 using a courthouse steps block. In the screenshot above I have chosen a layout of 2 by 6 blocks 8in square plus sashing. EQ7 works out the dimensions of the finished quilt as you adjust the sizes of your blocks so you can try different possibilities until it's just right!

Next I move on to 'Layer 1' to place blocks:

This was a courthouse step block from the EQ library but I needed to recolour it. By holding down 'Ctrl' on my keyboard I could colour all the blocks at once.

This gave me a good idea of what the quilt would look like but it's even better if you can use the actual fabrics in EQ7. I've discovered that many quilt fabric manufacturers have pictures of all their fabrics on their website which you can save and import into EQ7 or you may find suitable pictures on a fabric shop website. This can save time scanning your fabrics. Here is the quilt with my fabrics:

Notice I also added a narrow border to represent the binding. So it's all planned but how much fabric would I need? EQ7 works that out too. You have to go to 'Print' then 'Fabric Yardage' then 'Preview' to see the fabric requirements and I've found they can be a little generous but that's better than running out! You can also print out rotary cutting directions, paper piecing patterns or templates too.

I did play some more with the design in EQ7 and tried different numbers of blocks with borders and a different fabric choice. If you have EQ7 you can download my project file and see the quilt layouts:



I'll try to do regular posts and tutorials for EQ7 in the coming weeks and add more projects to download. Let me know if you like them and if you have any questions about EQ leave a comment and I'll try to help.