Tutorial - How to Rescale Fabrics in EQ7

I'm back with another tutorial for EQ7!  This month's tutorial is all about getting the images of the fabric designs to appear the correct size relative to the block and the quilt within EQ7.

(You can find my first EQ7 tutorial on using the program to design triangle quilts here,  I am hoping to make this a monthly EQ7 tutorial post so if you have any questions on using EQ7 or suggestions for tutorials you would like to see, please leave me a comment or send me an e-mail.)

When using EQ7's built in fabrics, purchased fabric image collections from EQ7, or downloadable fabric image collections from fabric manufacturers, the fabric images tend to scale pretty well in EQ7 digital quilts.  However, if you are designing a quilt and use a saved image of a fabric (from a store you purchased the fabric from or a picture you take of the fabric), the scale can be very off making the print of the fabric very small, distorted, and difficult to see.  

Here is an example of a classic bear claw block quilt having 12" (finished) blocks with 3" (finished) sashing using images of Daysail by Bonnie & Camille for Moda that I saved off of the online store's website where I purchased the fabric.

You can see from the picture that the scale of the print is off and that you can't really see any detail in many of the fabric prints.  To fix this, you could resize all of your images in a photo editing software or you can fake it in EQ7 very simply, here is how:

1.  Go into into the layout tab at the bottom of the quilt page.  You can see from the Horizontal Layout tab that my quilt is 48" x 48" with 12" blocks and 3" sashing.  

2.  Rescale your block (and sashing size) to be 1/2 to 1/4 of the original.  For this quilt I shrunk the quilt size to 1/3 of the original (by dividing the block and sashing size by 3) so that my quilt became 16" x 16" with 4" blocks and 1" sashing.  You may have to play around with the rescaling factor to work with your blocks and fabric pictures.

And here is the resized quilt:

You can see how the quilt looks now.  Much better, right?  You can actually see the images of the fabrics in this picture!  (Just make sure that when printing templates or figuring out yardage you are using the original version and not the shrunken one).

Here are the two versions side by side for comparison:

I hope this this tip helps you!  If you have any questions, please leave them in the comments below or e-mail me and I will do my best to answer them.

I am linking up to Tips and Tutorials Tuesday @ Late Night Quilter, Main Crush Monday @ Cooking Up Quilts, Sew Cute Tuesday @ Blossom Heart Quilts, and Fabric Tuesday @ Quilt Story.