WIP Wednesday - November 4th

First off, I have some excellent news...I went to the orthopedic doctor on Friday and my brace came off, no more broken wrist!!  My wrist feels great so I have jumped back into the sewing groove.

Here are my sewing projects I have going on right now...

1.  Baby quilt for my sister's friend

I had pinned the blocks together for this quilt top right before I went roller skating with plans to sew them together after the kids went to bed.  Once I fell and broke my wrist these blocks sat ready to sew for about 5 weeks.  

I have now finished the top adding a small white border to help frame the quilt top and to avoid distortion of the quilt top during quilting as the edges of all of the blocks are on the bias.

For this quilt I used a pattern from the Moda Bake Shop called Wishes String Quilt by Karen Vail of Cascade Quilts.  You can see my previous post about the making of the blocks here.

2.  Fabri-Quilt New Block Blog Hop 2015

As part of the New Quilt Blogger's Blog Hop we had a New Block Blog Hop sponsored by Fabri-Quilt.   We (the hosts of the blog hop) split the blocks we received to make into charity quilts.  I received 24 blocks (12.5" x 12.5") and am planning on making two quilts out of them, a lap quilt and a baby quilt.  

The blocks look so good together I am still in the planning stages on how I am going to combine them.  My initial thought is to add some white sashing with different colored cornerstones.  You can find links to all of the blocks and tutorials on Twiggy & Opal's Pinterest page.

3.  Moda Bake Shop

I unfortunately can only show you some of the fabric cuts from the jelly roll and not the finished quilt top, but I can tell you that the quilt is a lap size jelly roll quilt and will be published on the Moda Bake Shop's website (and here) on December 9th.  The fabric is from the Petite Prints Deux collection by French General.

4.  The 2016-2017 Mystery Quilt

This might be a little early to announce, but I do plan on having another mystery quilt next year starting in the summer of 2016!  

Right now, I am playing around with designs and different ideas.  I want to give myself plenty of time to come up with the design, write the pattern, prototype it, and get it tested before next summer.

I am very happy to link up with Let's Bee Social @ Sew Fresh Quilts, Needle and Thread Thursday @ My Quilt Infatuation, and WIP Wednesday @ Freshly Pieced.

EQ7 Tips & Tutorials - Part 2 of How to Import Fabrics into Your EQ7 Library

Yesterday I posted a tutorial about how where to find and download fabric images from the internet and how to organize them on your computer.  Today I am going to show you how to get those images into EQ7.

To import pictures from your computer into EQ7, follow these 4 steps:

Step 1 - Click on the "Libraries" tab and then "Fabric Library...".  This will bring up the Fabric Libraries window.

Step 2 - In the Fabric Libraries window, click on the "Import" button and select "From Image Files".  This will bring up the Import from Fabric Scans window.

Step 3 - Using your organized fabric files (more on how to organize them here), select the single image file you want and press Open or select an image file within a folder and then Ctrl-A (press Ctrl key and the A key at the same time) to select all of the files within the folder and press Open.

Step 4 - You will be brought back to the Fabric Libraries window and your fabrics you imported will show up on the right side of the window under the heading "Import Results".  (Don't stop here because your fabrics are not yet in your project).

Click on one of the fabric images within the Fabric Libraries window, press Ctrl-A again to select all of the fabric images and then click the "Add to Sketchbook" button.

Your fabric images will now show up in your Sketchbook Fabrics and Colors window (that pops up when you are coloring a block or quilt) at the end of the fabrics in the "Fabrics" tab.

And now you can play with your fabrics!

Bonus tip - If you have already imported fabrics into one EQ7 file and want to use them in another file, in Step 2 you can select "From Project" instead and all of the fabrics in that project (both EQ7 standards and your additional ones) will show up in the "Import Results" area.

Simply select the ones you want to import (holding the Ctrl key down clicking on the fabrics allows for you to select multiple images) and press the "Add to Sketchbook" button.

I hope you find these tutorials helpful!  Please e-mail me or leave a comment with any EQ topics you would like me to cover.

EQ7 Tips & Tutorials - Part 1 of How to Import Fabrics into Your EQ7 Library

One of my quilty friends Jayne asked a great question asking to get fabric images into your EQ7 library.  I started to write a tutorial for that and realized that it made sense to first show where to get fabric images.

So I broke the tutorial up into two parts, today I will be focusing on how to get fabric images onto your computer and tomorrow I will show you how to import them into EQ7.

Note:  As far as I can tell (and I am not a lawyer), the fabric images you find on the internet are for personal, home use only.  Not for commercial uses (like in printed pattern instructions, product packaging, websites, etc).

There are three main ways to get fabric images:

1. Free from the internet
2. Purchased from the internet
3. Photographed from your own stash

1.  Free from the internet:

Pros:

• Many of the fabric manufacturer's actually have places on their sites where you can download entire collections of fabric in a zip file (so you can download 20-40 fabric images at once).  
• They are free :)

Cons:

• Most of the images are not scaled properly for EQ7 making the scale of the fabric too big or small in the quilt (but you can use this trick to make them work).

Here is a bunch of places to find fabric images:

United Notions - Moda Fabrics - (Free) - The United Notions website contains almost 900 fabric collections and is constantly updated with the soon to be released and just released fabric.  Each collection is downloaded as a zip file.

Riley Blake - (Free) - For Riley Blake's fabric collection images, you need to select the fabric tab from the main menu, select the collection you wish to download, and then press the download images button.

Online Fabric Stores:  Some online fabric stores will allow you to download and use their fabric images provided you had purchased the fabric through them.

2.  Purchased Images from the Internet

Pros:

• Easy install  
• Fabric images are scaled correctly for EQ7
• Quickest way to get tons of fabric images pretty inexpensively

Cons:

• Not free

Electronic Quilt - ($7.95 for 1000+ images) - Electronic Quilt has many collections of fabric images for sale in categories such as Halloween prints, Batiks, and Fall 2015 releases.  I have never bought an image package from EQ, but I because EQ prepared it, most likely the images are more properly scaled than some other downloads.  (Note: I could not find out any information about use restrictions of the images on the EQ website.)

3.  Photographing Your Own Stash

Pros:

• Free
• You will have a indexed library of all of your fabrics 

Cons:

• Time consuming
• Colors and scale of fabrics may be off

Photographing your own stash is great because you can have your stash organized and ready to play with ion EQ whenever you want.  The downside is that this is the most time consuming and the colors and scale might not be correct.

Image Organization

Whichever method you use to acquire your fabric images, pretty soon you are going to have more files than you know what to do with on your computer.  I suggest that just as you organize your real fabrics you organize your online fabric image "stash" too.

On my computer I have a folder set up that is called "Fabric".  In that folder, I have have about 40 other folders, each with a collection name on them.  This way, if I am thinking that I want to play around with the new Bonnie and Camille fabric, I can go right to the "Hello Darling" folder for all of the images.  It takes just a few minutes to set everything up correctly to start with and it will save you a lot of time in the future.

I'll be back tomorrow with a tutorial on how you are going to get all of your new fabric images into EQ7 to start putting them into quilts.

Blogger's Quilt Festival - Fall 2015 - Riley Blake Triangle Quilt

It's that time of the year again...twice a year during quilt market, Amy, who blogs over at Amy's Creative Side, hosts the Blogger's Quilt Festival.  We are allowed to link up two quilts to the various categories and have the opportunity to visit and be inspired by other blogger's wonderful quilts.  I was so excited to be highlighted in March in one of Amy's Blogger's Quilt Festival Features.

My first entry to the festival is my Riley Blake Triangle Quilt which I designed and made for the Riley Blake challenge from the Modern Quilt Guild over the summer.  My post about the quilt and design can be found here and I am entering the quilt into the Small Quilt category. 

An equilateral triangle quilt has been on my to-do list forever and after I saw that some of the challenge fabrics had a repeating triangle print, I was sold.  In addition to making a triangle quilt for the first time, this was also the first time I had ever bound a quilt without 90 degree corners.

The quilt finished at about 48" x 48", a perfect size for a new baby.  I have a new niece or nephew due this in about a month and if the baby is a girl, I will be sending this quilt off to her. 

I knew that for the quilting in the background areas, I wanted to echo the hexagon shape formed by the print fabrics and then fill in the remaining space with a dense back and forth quilting.  I also wanted to mimic the quilting from the print areas in some of the background, negative space triangles.  I used a ribbon candy design in the print areas that once quilted, almost gave the hexagons quilting pattern that almost resembled a flower.

My other entry the Improv Table Runner is entered into the Modern Quilt category and can be found here.

Here are my entries over the years:

Spring 2015: Use Your Illusion
Spring 2015: Plus Plus - Two Tone Version

Fall 2014: Oh The Places You'll Go
Fall 2014: Vintage Star

Spring 2014: Kona 2013 Quilt
Spring 2014: Improv Quilt Two

Fall 2013: Pi Quilt
Fall 2013: Pink Broken Herringbone Quilt

If you have stopped by my blog for the first time from the quilt festival thank you!  You can find some of my finishes, newly revamped tutorials page, and mystery quilt-a-long on the tabs at the top of the page.  

If you would like to follow my blog, here are some links for some different following options: Bloglovin, Email, Instagram.

Blogger's Quilt Festival - Fall 2015 - Improv Table Runner

I love taking part in Amy's Quilt Blogger Festival twice a year over on her blog Amy's Creative Side.  We are allowed to link up two quilts to the various categories and have the opportunity to visit and be inspired by other blogger's wonderful quilts.  I was so excited to be highlighted in March in one of Amy's Blogger's Quilt Festival Features.

My second entry to the festival is my Improv Table Runner which I designed and made for my Aunt and Uncle's 50 wedding anniversary.  My post about the quilt and design can be found here and I am entering the quilt into the Modern category. 

I have always admired by Aunt's art, she has been creating longer than I have been alive. Growing up, we had many of her ceramics and mixed media paintings in our house. Based on her art, I thought she might appreciate some improvisational quilting.

I decided on using mostly blue and green solids I with a black print or two. I also included typewriter fabric (Cotton & Steel's Black and White collection) because it was just too cute not to.

To make the piece I started with a loose idea of how wide I wanted the runner to be and just I improv pieced a couple of green and blue strips. I played around with them to see how to fit them all together and added in some stripes of essex linen in black (I love the texture it adds) and some shiny Cotton & Steel to add some sparkle. 

I used a serpentine stitch on my Bernina for some quick quilting, marking the first line down the center and then using the edge of my walking foot for spacing each additional line. The runner finished at 15" x 48". My husband liked it so much he asked me to make another one for our buffet (which is modeling the runner in this picture).

My other entry my Riley Blake Triangle Quilt, which is entered into the Small Quilts category and can be found here.

Here are my entries over the years:

Spring 2015:  Use Your Illusion

Spring 2015:  Plus Plus - Two Tone Version

Fall 2014:  Oh The Places You'll Go

Fall 2014:  Vintage Star

Spring 2014:  Kona 2013 Quilt

Spring 2014:  Improv Quilt Two

Fall 2013:  Pi Quilt

Fall 2013:  Pink Broken Herringbone Quilt

If you have stopped by my blog for the first time from the quilt festival thank you!  You can find some of my finishes, newly revamped tutorials page, and mystery quilt-a-long on the tabs at the top of the page.  

If you would like to follow my blog, here are some links for some different following options: Bloglovin, Email, Instagram.