CONTENTS: Announcements - Ask EQ - Free Stuff - Stitched With Love - STASH Fall 2000 - Works For Me - Benni Harper Lessons - Show & Tell - Author! Author! - BlockBase - EQ Holiday Card - Quilt University - YesUCan - Perfect Tool.



EQ: A Perfect Tool for the Quilting Professional
by Mary Waller

Mary Waller, of Vermillion, South Dakota, is a teacher/designer who has gotten lots of local newspaper publicity, in part for the many ways she uses EQ. We asked her to share some of her ideas.

As a freelance quilt designer, instructor and author, EQ is an indispensable part of my business. Here are some ways to you can put EQ to work for your quilting business.

Business Stationary and Promotional Literature

  Use EQ with your computer, color printer and specialty papers to promote your business or event. You'll have the flexibility of printing only what you need,and be able to change your content and design quickly and easily.

  Nothing commands attention like color, and quilting is an especially visual medium. With today's affordable desktop color printers, it's easy to use EQ blocks and quilts to add color to letterheads, business cards, brochures, newsletters, signs, bookmarks, coupons, articles, patterns and class handouts. You can purchase forms designed for business cards, address labels, certificates and stationary. For high quality presentations and greater durability, print on card stock or cover copy paper to make brochures, signs, posters and the covers of spiral bound books.

If you want to reduce printing costs and time while still using color, print in black on colored paper or specialty papers with printed backgrounds or borders.

For Writing and Teaching

You can draw and color step-by-step diagrams for quilting instructions in EQ, export them to EQ's clipboard, and paste them into a word processing document.

Here's how I made a setting fabric cutting diagram (figure 1) for my Sheepfold/Puss in the Corner quilt (figure 2), with 10" blocks:

I chose the Country Set quilt layout, setting the layout height at 40, "with no borders. I do my yardage calculations based on getting 40 "of usable width from 45" fabric. I colored the setting squares red. This quilt requires twelve 10-1/2" setting squares, so, I put those squares on the setting 'fabric'/CountryLayout first. Fourteen yellow quarter-square triangles are needed. I put three 15" yellow blocks divided into quarter-square triangles on the 'fabric', and one square with two quarter-square triangles and one black half-square triangle that will be left over. Four blue half-square triangles are needed for the corners. I put two 8" blocks divided into half-square triangles on the 'fabric'.

In my instruction book, I illustrate these cutting diagrams using one shade of gray for the cut pieces; I'm sure if I put different colors for the different sizes and shapes, I'd confuse the heck out of the students. And it's more cost-effective to print in gray than color. I also emphasize that the cutting diagrams are shown on a single layer of fabric, not folded with selvedge sevenas cutting instructions are usually shown.  You can also use Country Set for exploded diagrams illustrating construction techniques. Place blocks, rows of blocks and sections of a quilt wherever you'd like on the quilt. Think of the Country Set layout as the design wall in quilting instructions.

Research and Documentation

If you're a quilt appraiser, restorer or historian, EQ on a laptop computer makes a great research assistant! Add BlockBase and your laptop becomes a powerful and portable tool for researching quilt history and patterns, documentation projects and working on the road. Quilt appraisers can document quilts and search BlockBase for pattern names. Restorers can outline proposed work for clients. Use EQ to draft patterns from antique quilts; EQ's flexibility is a must in dealing with the inaccuracies in antique quilts that just won't work with today's accurate cutting and piecing techniques.

CONTENTS: Announcements - Ask EQ - Free Stuff - Stitched With Love - STASH Fall 2000 - Works For Me - Benni Harper Lessons - Show & Tell - Author! Author! - BlockBase - EQ Holiday Card - Quilt University - YesUCan - Perfect Tool.