This is a quilt I have made for my niece’s 21st Birthday. The central block was drawn by me, and the floral swag is composed of a combination of an EQ block (the bird on the bough) and sections I drew myself or adapted from other EQ blocks.  Other blocks are from the EQ library.  I put the design together having seen a quilt with a central block surrounded by rail fence blocks and corner stars.  I was also influenced by the fact that I had a lot of “charm packs” waiting to be used up and wanted a design that would be relatively easy to put together.  I quilted this on my domestic sewing machine, using a combination of “stitch in the ditch” for the rail fence and star blocks, and outline quilting for the appliqué and charm pack squares.

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." There was a fabric swap at a local quilt shop. Everyone picked their "ugliest" fabric and brought it in. Then all the participants in the swap had to pick a fabric other than their own and design and sew a quilt using the fabric given. Using EQ's fabric yardage chart and ability to import scanned fabrics really helped in the planning of this quilt.

This quilt was orginally submitted for the 05/2008 Club EQ challenge called Three! My inspiration was my frustration at not being able to find a pattern to work with the nine half yard cuts of fabulous Kaffee Fassett fabric I had purchased. I did not want to cut this great fabric up into little peices. So I made my own pattern in EQ. This is the "practice" quilt I made to see what worked and didn't work before I cut up my fabulous Kaffee fabric.

At the Houston International Quilt Show, I saw the original version in the Zundt Designs (machine embroidery) booth. It was done in pastels, tied and had a pillowcase finish. It was just enough to show the machine embroidery designs but not much else. With Zundt Designs' permission, I created my own version in a deeper palette, heavily quilted with freemotion designs and featured a scalloped border so that I could teach it at a local quilt store.

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I had designed this quilt originally for Laurel Burch’s Mystical Horse fabric. I didn’t want to cut the fabric up into small pieces. The top is pieced and looks great, it just needs borders and to be quilted. I liked the design so much I decided to use it with this collection of Halloween fabric called Witches’ Undies. The print was smaller so I decided to reduce the size of the pattern in half from the Mystical horse top. I have another that I hope to do in a 9” large square with a 4.5” small square. Someday I hope to publish the pattern.

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My friends think I quilt all day in front of a sewing machine and don't realize it's mostly computer work. I was talking with a buddy who said he loved Klimt's work and the colors and blocky-ness of the designs. I thought about Klimt for a few days and wondered how I could do it as a quilt and came up with this design. I liked the simplicity of the plain blocks, 4-Patches, and 9-Patches, and the way they are alternated with "log cabins". I colored it in Klimt-ish colors and thought, "oh that's nice." Well, someone must have walked by and seen my computer screen, because the next thing I knew I was asked to print off the patterns for Margaret to sew. I think the pattern really came to life in Margaret's hands. She has an eye for color and changed the quilt from a pattern that would appeal to some people to a brilliant color theory study that appeals to a wider audience.

-Andrea

This quilt design was submitted for the 08/2006 EQ Challenge, Mathematical Concepts. I submitted a bargello design as a mathematical concept of a mobius strip. This quilt was inspired by Autumn Glow, pg 60 of Colorwash Bargello Quilts by Beth Ann Williams. Her design is mirrored horizontally, rotated 180 degrees so it is upside down, rows 1-3 are altered so they continue going down instead of progressing back up, and recolored. The fabric for the border was found only after the interior was completed and the quilt told me what it needed to be.

You can get some really unpleasant surprises on the design wall when doing a bargello if you do not model it in EQ first.

In 2008, my mom and I created this quilt on EQ6 together. She drew the picture and painting it on the background fabric. She also chose the blocks to use then I put it all together and made it come to life. This quilt was created for my cousins who teamrope all the time. In the center of the 4 corner blocks we added a rope to two of them and their brand to the other two. When Cynthia Spethman from Montana quilted it for us, she added different brands in with the stippling. So as you meander around the quilt on the background, there are several different brands. My mom Joanna chose the colors but had only picked the tourquise, black and tan. I added the red after she had told me that my cousin Kelly had just painted her kitchen and added some red in with the decor of her house. I thought it dressed the quilt up considerably.

This quilt was originally designed and submitted for the Aug 2007 EQ Challenge called One Patch. The computer gremlins eat my submission so it didn't get posted. I pieced and quilted this myself. This is the first time I used free motion in the border to make a series of leaves. You can buy an acrylic template for the one patch, print templates from EQ, or if you don't want to deal with bias edges use the method described in the book Square Dance by Martha Thompson. I plan to make this quilt again with Kaffee Fassett fabric.

I was trying to come up with segments for the TV show America Quilts Creatively. I thought I ought to do one on foundation patterns and Crazy quilts were a natural for that technique. I found that 7.5" blocks fit great on 8.5" x 11" paper, so that's how big I made all 9 blocks in the center. The wallhanging was fun to design. I drew some quilting stencils in long lines and set them over the seams to simulate the embellishments. When I was ready to sew, I printed all the patterns on to EQ Printables Foundation sheets and foundation pieced the blocks in fun vibrant colors. I left the foundation sheets in the blocks (and didn't tear them out) so that they would work as a stabilizer for the stitches and embellishment. I passed the blocks off to Margaret Okuley in our office and she stitched the blocks together and added borders and backing for me so I could move on to planning other episodes.

-Andrea