When I design an original quilt, it is usually with a person in mind. Once when I was choosing fabrics for a quilt, I realized that these were the colors that my exchange student at the time wore. It became a sampler quilt, with the blocks Marion's Choice, Jacob's Ladder (my husband's name), Dutchman's puzzle (the student was Dutch) and Chinese coin (he was ethnically Chinese). It is the black quilt in my profile.

Right now I am considering a quilt for my current students, one Italian, one French. The Italian is appalled that we put pineapple on pizza, so OF COURSE I am going to put in a pineapple block. He also likes to be the center of attention, so it will be medallion style. And so on...



I find I don't have the patience to learn the quilting programs, so I just go back to graph paper and pencil. colored, of course. I have EQ5, but I have been very frustrated by it, and I don't want to take the time to learn it.

EQ has a bunch of books on their website about all aspects of designing with EQ7. I have all of them, very helpful! I have designed many quilts on EQ. I often take one of their blocks in the block library and fiddle with it to get the block I want. For fabric, their website has lots of free fabric image downloads to add to the fabric library. I don't ever try to get an exact fabric, just a value and hue, and maybe size and character of print. The quilts always look different in real life than they do on the screen. The program allows me to try many different color combos easily. They have a feature that looks like a magic wand that lets you random recolor, move the hue a number of degrees, or move intensity or brightness. Then you can click to replace those colors with fabrics. The yardage estimator is helpful, it lets me know if I have enough of a stash fabric for that color.

It's a great program, with some limitations. For example: If you want to design quilts with divided hexagons, you have to do workarounds, one of the books talks about that.
Kathy

Thanks for all the info! Is there a book you recommend that has
good explanations of how to do each step?

Have you scanned your own fabric to use in your projects?
This step has me stumped.

You are a wealth of information! Thanks so much!

Oh, wow......so much to say here!

The easiest way is to choose a premade block in EQ7, from the block library, and then choose your quilt setting, and set the block. This gives you a fairly traditional quilt, although you can mix and match several blocks, etc.

A step up from that is to do "custom layout" where you can set your blocks to any position, size, etc. You set the size of the quilt, but then you click and drag the block to where you want it, and then can resize it. You do this for all the blocks you want in the quilt.

A step up from that is to open a block in the Block worktable and erase lines, add lines, etc. to create your own block. Or use their Serendipity tool to merge blocks. Then create the quilt layout as above.

Then stepping up from that is to draw your own. I've only done one that way, and I still find it very difficult to draw freehand shapes (if you are doing geometric shapes it is fine). Correction, I did two that way. still -- it's difficult at times, though there are loads of videos in the "help" files of EQ7 to teach you how to do it. If you have time and inclination to go through step by step and work through the classes/videos (in the software, and on their blog), that will help tons.

I'm running out the door for the day, but I will try and come back to follow-up if you have any questions, although I am not an expert by any means. I do use it, to design layouts, but I don't draw my own blocks much. Still, if you have questions, I can try to answer them, or maybe someone else will chime in

What is the best way to design an original quilt?
How have others used the EQ software to design their own quilts?