Tuesday, May 10, 2016

Creating a Block from a Drawing in EQ7 - Celebrating 25 years of EQ!

We are continuing along with the year long celebration of EQ's 25th birthday!  I use EQ on a regular basis when designing and love sharing about it - it's a fabulous tool and I learn more about it every time I do something new.  They have a really great website - DoYouEQ.com, that has so many resources for learning about this great program.  If you ever wonder how to do something, you can usually find the answer there!  Plus they have fabric downloads, project downloads and you can add your own projects to the gallery as well.  You can learn a ton by doing their weekly lessons.  If you don't have EQ yet, check out their contest page to find out how you can win a copy.

This month I worked with my local American Heritage Girl troop to create a block for the 50th anniversary of the group so the girls can get a special badge.  In March I went to one of their meetings and worked with the girls to design the block. After we decided to create an applique block I had the girls make drawings of what they thought would be a good block to represent our area. One of the girls came up with a great design and we decided to use that for the quilt block. So my challenge in using EQ7 this month was to create a block from the drawing.  Since I needed the block to be larger than the drawing, I thought it would be easier to trace it, then I could just print up the templates for the size of block that was needed, and have the girls help with cutting out the appliques and fusing them to the background.


Importing the image for drawing was pretty easy - I did have to scan it twice, because the first time my scanner saved it as a pdf file.  That won't work, you need to save it as a jpeg - and make sure you know where you save it to so you can find it!  After you import your image you can drag it to fit the area you want to work in.  I accidentally made my drawing fit an inch below the top of my block - but that just leaves more sky at the top for this version.


 I started off by making my trees.  That was an easy shape to draw with straight lines.  By using the clone button on the top toolbar I was able to make all 7 trees quickly, then just use the pick tool to click and drag them into position:
Then click the button to hide image to see what the block looks like so far.  We've got a nice little forest going!


I made the water section by using the bezier curve tool to create the arcs for the waves and the line tool to complete the patch with sides and the bottom line.  Then I made a cool discovery when I went to make the boat!  When I clicked on the ellipse tab I noticed a set of red icons on the top toolbar and when I realized what they were for I was super excited!
Do you see the middle one, that looks like a pie?  That will allow you to make a circle that has part of it that is cut out!  By setting the bottom number to 180 I was able to make the perfect shape for the bottom of the boat by just clicking and dragging the shape.  Pretty awesome!  I highly recommend paying attention to the different buttons that appear when you work with different drawing tools.  I've made some fun discoveries by just playing around with these different settings.

If you are working with a number of pieces, you will want to make sure that they are layered correctly.  You can do this by clicking Hide/Show AutoFill at the top.  My boat needs to go under the water strip, so I can use the pick tool to select it, then send it to the back.  

Here is what the block looked like after I had it all drawn and colored:

And this is what our finished block looked like:

The girls had a really good time working on this!  I hope that they will want to do more quilting with me in the future.  Several of them went home with some of my scraps - I can't wait to see what they do with them.

Make sure you stop by and see what the rest of the bloggers are up to this month with EQ7 as we celebrate their 25th year!  

Darlene of QuiltShopGal

Carol of Fun Threads Designs

Mary of Quiltin’ Grandma’s Designs

Carole of From My Carolina Home

Marian of Seams to be Sew

Tina of Quilting Affection

3 comments:

Marian said...

great post today, thanks for showing the differences between the tabs also as that is always so helpful.

Also, thanks for posting the links, because I installed a new desktop a few weeks ago I'd lost my list in email so will now go post the links to my post today also. :)

Mary said...

Nice block. I haven't played much with the block drawing. I love getting tips like these to learn more.

QuiltShopGal said...

What a fun tutorial. Thanks for sharing your knowledge and helping to celebrate #EQ25. Great job.

QuiltShopGal
www.quiltshopgal.com