Designing virtual quilts for On Track magazine
Writing articles for the NQA Quilting Quarterly on judging
Longarm Quilting
Teaching EQ7 classes
cleaning, cooking, and
setting up a fabric dyeing area in the basement...
and none of them were obviously blog posts
Here's there I started with Brandon's quilt, did an image search on Google, looking for a cartoonish kind of tractor that would be cute on a child's quilt. This is what I picked - love the eyes and the smile, such expression!
So next I uploaded this image into EQ7 as a jpeg image to be
traced,above. Tracing took a chunk of time as I had to be create
applique patches and figure out the layering from back to front. Here's
the PatchDraw Motif worktable from EQ7 where I traced it using the
freehand drawing tool.
Once I had that figured out I printed out the fabric yardage amounts and headed to my favorite quilt shop, Ryco, in Lincoln, RI. I had an EQ7 group to teach too so "two birds with one stone" .
Here's the pattern. I printed our the whole block adjusted by EQ to a 24" center, then printed out the applique pieces. In EQ7 you can select your seam allowance width, I printed it out with no seam allowance as it was going to be raw edge applique.
Once I had all the applique pieces cut out the layered pieces using Misty Fuse fusible (my favorite). Wibbled the pieces around a bit to make sure all the raw edges were evenly positioned/covered.Lots of pins here, then fused the back layer down, zigzagged the edges, then worked my way forward, removing the pins as I went. Here her is all pinned and ready to be stitched.
Next I needed templates for the letters for his name, so went into word, played with fonts and sizes, then printed out the templates for the name letters. Misty-fused a chunk of black fabric, then cut out and fused the letters onto the background. After they were satin stitched, trimmed the little hairs that always seem to hatch with raw edge applique
All satin stitched and ready for the borders.
For the border, I went back to Google images searching for construction tape, found this one and downloaded it, checked the angle of the stripe with a protractor, made a yellow and black strata, then cut chunks of the strata for the border.Played with the width of the finished border a bit - like to try different widths and take pictures, then compare them til one works really well.
(overly skinny borders are a pet peeve of mine...LOL)
Here's the finished design...
So here it is all designed, but of course, can't find the jpeg of it in its final state before I wrapped it up and gave it to the birthday boy - just a bit late. He's enjoying it and insists on quite a pile of quilts quilts every night, regardless of the weather.
Hope you enjoyed seeing the process. EQ7 is such a versatile tool, can do it all from soup to nuts.
