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EQ7 Tutorial

Purple appliqued butterfly on a blue background.
Butterfly Quilt

 

I am so excited to be able to share this. The goal was to print applique shapes from EQ7 without the letters and text so that I could publish my pattern.  This led me on a internet search and then a twitter post introduced me to Al Navas.  I’ll let him explain what we did, but if you use EQ7, this is brilliant. If you don’t, there’s a great section on Inkscape which is a nifty free program that I can now use for more than patterns and other fun stuff. Please hop on over to his site, EQ7 Training, to download the lesson AND the pattern. For Free!  How awesome is that?

Working on a project with someone who has same passion for bringing quality instruction to the web is now one of the highlights of my summer. I am hopeful that this will not be our last collaboration.

What are your EQ Challenges?

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Getting Ready to Publish

birdiehouseAugust (2)

Well, I’m getting closer to publishing my first pattern. I teach an applique class and was getting really frustrated with the patterns that are readily available, so I made my own. EQ7 made designing a snap.  I taught a class and the students were really great about testing this pattern and yes, found a few mistakes. I ran into issues when printing the templates; I won’t get into the details now, let’s just say I wasn’t happy with the process I was using.

Then Twitter jumped in. I’d been lax in using my Twitter account, but finally decided to jump in. Within hours, I got a tweet from an EQ instructor of all people.  This eventually led to us working on a great (and super efficient) way to do what I wanted. Ok, he did most of the work, I just added comments here and there. I don’t want to spoil the surprise, but.,,,,,there will be a lesson posted to his website…..soon. When it is, I’ll post a link.

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Happy Birthday Discount to Me!

Quilting fabric, patterrns, and booklets
My Birthday Haul

 

Yesterday, I went to two local quilt shops to cash in on my birthday discount. One shop offers 20%, the other half your age. The one day it actually pays to be older!

I came hope with 2 jelly rolls and fabric to make gifts for friends. A quilt kit for me!  Seriously, I actually bought something to make for myself. Picked up a Halloween applique pattern and a few free motion books. One of these days, I’ll conquer free motion. For the icing on my cake, I added quilt themed microfiber cleaning cloths. If you don’t own those, you should.

Hope you’re lucky enough to know quilt shops that offer birthday discounts.