A big Congratulations goes out to Marjorie Rhine of Damascus, OR. Her quilt, “Transformed”, won Honorable Mention in the 2009 Hoffman Challenge - Mixed Techniques division.
Marjorie also wrote Painless Paper-Piecing and is a Pattern Editor for American Quilter.
Check out more of Marje’s work on her website: Quilt Design NW (http://www.QuiltDesignNW.com )
Michele Crawford has been designing quilts professionally for twenty years. She has some beautiful quilts and now she designs mainly for The Quilter magazine (www.thequiltermag.com).
In the November issue of The Quilter (page 42) she has an adorable quilt called “Country Pumpkins.” It’s warm and inviting, just right for the season.
Michele says, “I design quilts featuring new fabric collections. I actually receive digital images directly from the fabric companies for their new collections as I’m designing for the magazine.
I design all my quilts on EQ6, and couldn’t have done what I have done without Andrea and Penny’s help over the years.”
You can read more about her on her website www.flowerboxquilts.com. Her website includes her original quilt patterns and kits plus there are free quilt patterns. You can sign up for her emails and be the first to know about new patterns, kits, Fabshop Hop and other fun things.
Thanks for sharing your story Michele! We can’t wait to see what you come up with next. : )
Misty, relaxing colors, large prints and soft curves make for a lovely, peaceful quilt.
In the October/November issue of Quilt magazine (pg 14), Patricia Bravo uses her own line of fabrics to make a beautifully curved and calming quilt.
Patricia says, “it was done with EQ6; in fact, I make ALL of them on your software… Well, once you start drawing on EQ6 you become addicted!
I love curves and all the blocks with curves in the world! So I use all the ones provided on EQ6 and BlockBase. My style and approach to design may be different from other quilters; I try to give a contemporary twist to my designs and to make blocks compatible with my big print fabrics. The new trend in quilting is big prints, big blocks, and easy to sew! I think curved blocks are not used to their fullest potential and they are so fun. Plus, believe it or not, I never piece a curved block; I use an appliqué technique to encourage quilters to sew curved blocks and not to be afraid of curves! I have a tutorial on my blog and people love it… ‘curved seams 101‘. I print my templates from EQ6, but I use them differently…
On my quilt “Refreshing Spa Bubbles” I was looking for a lot of movement, and I think I achieved that! It’s very modern, fast to sew, and the result is an appealing and attractive quilt (in my opinion).
I am very happy with the software; you made a lot of improvements from EQ5. Would recommend it to anybody; it is very versatile!!”
The kit for Refreshing Spa Bubbles is available at materialgirlfabrics.com. You can visit Patricia’s website for project ideas, sneak peaks at what she is working on and lots more at www.artgalleryfabrics.typepad.com.
Barbara Campbell is a professional designer from New Jersey. Some of her fabric has been featured in Stash and she loves EQ Printables. Barbara says, “I endorse the EQ Printables, which I really like. I used another product in an earlier quilt and after it was washed, it faded considerably.”
She made a floral vest using the EQ Printables that was featured in the September issue of The Quilter Magazine (pg. 67). Barbara walks you through the steps of printing out images on fabric and how she incorporated it into her vest. The bold colors of the flowers are really captured in the printable fabric.
Looks great, Barbara! Is this giving anyone else any ideas?
Susan Davis is a pattern designer and has a company called “Aunt Susie’s House.” She specializes in punch needle and teaches the punch needle technique on fabric motifs.
Susan says: “I love EQ. I am self taught and constantly learning, but I love this program. It makes my designing so much easier. I can change so many items in my design with just a click on a key. Thanks for a great program. I love my EQ6.”
Check out her new patterns she created in EQ featuring the Peppermint Cottage fabric from Clothworks.
Susan’s Joyful Gingerbread quilt:
Susan’s Joyful Gingerbread tablerunner:
Thanks to everyone who submitted blocks for the super-secret present for Barb Vlack.
We wanted to celebrate the community ClubEQ created and celebrate the hard work of Barb Vlack, our ClubEQ challenge leader. Some of you may not know she’s not an EQ employee. She was one of our first customers. She’s been doing ClubEQ and techsupporting Info-EQ & our forums for free and for the fun of it all these years. In ClubEQ there are over 9000 of your quilts to show for all that hard work.
Here at EQ, we decided to organize a secret quilt for her as a way of saying thanks for all she’s done. We wanted this to be a surprise that we would spring on her at Quilt Festival.
Here’s the quilt:
Here’s the label:
As you can see by her smile in the next post. She was overjoyed by the result.
Thanks again to everyone who submitted a block.
Barb Vlack was surprised! When we saw Barb during Quilt Festival in Houston last week we presented her with a sampler quilt with blocks made by users from all over the world: England, Germany, New Zealand, South Africa, France, Canda & the U.S.
The quilt celebrates Barb’s 10 year anniversary (!) as clubEQ challenge leader — ten years of thinking up interesting challenges, and ten years of designing quilts to illustrate her challenge idea.
Thanks so much for your clubEQ leadership Barb — lots of work, lots of challenging ideas to help EQ users learn new tricks and techniques, and lots of fun seeing what you’ll come up with each month!
Find the mouse and his pumpkin on www.electricquilt.com.
Send the link of the page you found it on to penny@electricquilt.com today for a chance to win a copy of the book Blending Photos with Fabric 2 by Mary Ellen Kranz.
We will pick the winner tomorrow morning.
You can make your own holiday cards using EQ6! Download this free EQ6 quilt project to be your card template. Swap out the block using the Set Block tool for one from the library or one that you draw yourself.
Print on heavyweight paper and simply fold the 8-1/2″ x 11″ paper into quarters. You can buy envelopes in large quantities from your local office supply store. The ones that are about 4-3/8″ x 5-3/4″ will fit the folded cards with a little wiggle room.
Like the card idea? How about gift tags too?!
Print as Many as fit can help you there. Just select the block, and print “showing fabrics.”
If you make your block size small (like 2 inches) and put a check next to “print as many as fit” on the Options tab, you’ll get a whole page of gift cards you can cut out.
You can choose whether or not you want the black outlines on or off with the checkboxes on the Options tab for “print block outline” and “print patch outline.” Step by step instructions are on the notecards of the two different quilts in the project.
For the gift cards, print them on heavyweight paper (not just computer paper). Then spray adhesive on them (outdoors, so you don’t breathe it) and sprinkle on glitter. Cut them out, hole-punch the corners, and thread a ribbon through. The plain back side can hold “To: From:” messages.
Have fun!
The 35th annual Quilt Market & Festival in Houston finished on Sunday at 5pm. It was a long two weeks, but your excitement and awe kept us going (as did Barb Vlacks’ secret stash of homemade Marshmallows).
We saw a lot of familiar faces and a lot of new ones. As always, it was fun talking with friends, fellow vendors, teachers, authors, fabric designers, publishers, TV hosts, EQ fans, and new customers. We were so excited to see how many of you brought printouts and flyers by our booth to show off what you made in EQ. We can’t wait to blog about your design adventures and successes.
We bonded with a few, fellow Ohioans and joked with them whenever we walked by their booths. Marcia Derse is an artist out of the Toledo area (just north of us) and has a new fabric line from Troy Fabrics. Penny couldn’t leave her booth without getting a stack of hand-painted/hand-dyed fat quarters in all sorts of goldy-green shades. One of the HoopSisters is from Lima (just south of us) and does amazing quilt-as-you-go embroidery designs. She plans the quilts in EQ6 and then designs embroidery patterns to go with them.
The quilts in the exhibit hall were spectacular. Margaret and Andrea went to the convention center early every morning so they wouldn’t miss a single quilt. The different exhibits… Russian, Canadian, Flowers, The German Tree Forest, Hoffman Challenge, Architecture, Embroidery, Painted, all of them were so …. wow. The variety was just as stunning as the quilts. So many techniques, so little time…
The gadgets and gizmos for sale in the hall were just as fun. Everyone in our booth came home with something… or more than one something.
We found a lot of fun restaurants this year and enjoyed walking through the greenspace in front of the convention center. The trees and landscaping are really starting to thrive next to all those fields, and the pond with all the waterlilies. The puppies in the dog park were also cute to look at on our walk home to the hotel. Kudos to the city of Houston for all their work, it’s a pleasure to come to the city and the progress they have made has not gone unnoticed.
Thanks for a memorable 2 weeks.
A few months ago, Patricia Rhudy wrote in to say: “Just had to send you a note to tell you how much I love my EQ software. We are getting ready to celebrate our 30th anniversary this year, so of course I have been designing a quilt for the celebration. I was thinking that I wanted to make a quilt with 30 blocks that would have pictures highlighting special occasions from the last 30 years. I love the feature of adding a photo to any layer of my quilt because it helps me to determine what size the photos should be.
When my husband asked me what I wanted for our anniversary, I told him that I wanted something that he made. I knew that I wanted to make him a special quilt. I will send you a picture when I complete the quilt.”
Anniversaries are special, especially when you make it all the way to 30. We asked Patricia to tell us more about the anniversary quilt she designed in EQ send a picture. Of course, she is presenting it to her husband this weekend.
Patricia Rhudy writes: “The quilt is finished and I will be giving it to my husband on Sunday. You will notice that the quilt has an oriental feel about it. I did that because my husband gave me my engagement ring in New York’s Chinatown. We were there with his parents and went to a special dinner at the Hunan Gardens restaurant. After dinner we went shopping and purchased a set of dishes that were black, red, and white with an oriental pattern.
Since this is our 30th anniversary I made the quilt with 30 blocks and each block has a picture of something special that happened during those years. It was really hard to pick the pictures to use. It helped that I was able to audition them in EQ6. There have been so many wonderful things that we have experienced during these past 30 years. Our two daughters have grown up to be wonderful wives and mothers. They are both actively involved in giving back to their communities. I am so very proud of my daughters and can say that as a family we have truly been blessed many times over. My DH has always been there for me and is my “BFF” (best friend forever) and the love of my life.
My friend, Elaine Novak, machine quilted it for me with butterflies around the pictures and bamboo on the borders. I am attaching the pattern in EQ6 so you can see how I mapped out my quilt.
We are meeting our family for the weekend and will have a celebratory brunch on Sunday. That is when we will exchange gifts. I will send you another e-mail next week letting you know what my DHs special handmade gift was.
The black fabrics that I used in my quilt and the red fabric that I used was a Robert Kaufman print from the “Made in Japan” line.”
Congratulations to you both. Thanks for sharing your story. Here’s to many more happy years to come.
If you read our newsletter, you’re probably familiar with Glynis Thompson. She has a blog too where she posts daily EQ designs. Check out some of Glynis’s latest work.
Glynis made this free Waterlily Lattice Project to share for personal use:
Thanks Glynis! I know our users will appreciate the free project.
Our favorite mouse and mascot, EQ, would love a quilt to call his own.
He is small, gray and a bit vain about his looks.
His favorite food is cheese.
He lives in a box behind Penny’s computer monitor on her desk, and could definitely use a warm quilt.
He edits the monthly EQ Newsletter.
He has a Facebook page and loves his fans.
His best friend is Jean Claude, a small brown mouse who lives in the Art History department of Bowling Green State University.
He speaks French, but very poorly. Jean Claude is fluent.
Each month we have free fabrics available for download to add to your EQ5 or EQ6 program:
http://www.electricquilt.com/Users/Downloads/palette.asp
Sometimes people tell us what fabrics they want. Other times we make up the categories according to what ‘looks like fun.’
Don’t forget to have your voice heard. Vote for the fabrics you want and let us know what should be in the choices for the next month. (Otherwise Andrea might have to do another “Random Farm Animals” palette. Poor thing… she gets a little slap happy when she has too much to do and no one gives her any direction.)
Feel free to leave comments to let us know which fabrics you’d like to see. Thanks!
We’re here at quilt market in Houston. It’s so great to meet all of these hard-working shop owners and talk to our longtime customers. So many familiar faces… and so many new ones too.
Sample Spree was so much fun. It’s a chance for all the stores to buy all the new stuff the night before the show starts.
We have Kaleidoscope Mystery Quilts hanging in our booth. They’re gorgeous.
EQ the Mouse is lining up the next several newsletters and conducting interviews. He’s chatting it up with friends and posing for photos… although you can’t always see him because he’s so small. ; )
More to come… signing off for now…
EQ Blog