kristakz

I'm techy too (an engineer), so here's my take. I have EQ6, not sure what additional features EQ7 offers although I don't think there were many changes.

The 2 quilts you show are pretty easy. The Seuss one is a row quilt, which is a quilt type in EQ6. Both horizontal and veritcal. And you can make each row any width you want. The other, I would do a a single block, plus a series of borders. Since you can add any number of borders you want, and design them with blocks or other features, that would work. I'm not sure you can have different size blocks in each row/column, however.

But do like the program, and use it quite often - even drafting some quilts I've already designed, just for the fabric calculations. But it's not perfect. Here are a few issues I find with EQ. I think the border features are a bit limiting. I found that I can't always get the exact measurements I want for some reason. I try "tiled" borders, and it nicely adds sashing strips to make your tiles fit - but *it* picks the number of tiles, and always seems to go one more than I want to have. If there are too many blocks in your border, it's almost like the accuracy is off in the picture. I size a border, made of for example 15 spaced blocks, to exactly fit my quilt and it always looks like the last block is cut off.

I dearly wish I could import a block (picture), rather than drawing from scratch. But you can edit any block in the library.

Merging blocks works, but again has some limitations I don't like (or I just haven't figured it out completely). It's great for putting a block in the center of another. But you can only merge 1 thing into a block - you can't merge into a merged block (but you can merge that one into another, if that makes sense). So I made a "fractal" quilt - ever increasing (or decreasing, depending on your view) 8-pointed stars. But I can't create a lone star block with a different block merged into each corner.

However, you can draw anything. If you can draw it on graph paper, you can draw it in EQ.

You have several different options for quilt layouts, including strip quilts, on-point, "variable" blocks, and tumbling blocks. The only block shape I find limiting (and I have found a way around it) is the tumbling block layout. It is not designed to allow 6-pointed stars. I have no idea what to do with "variable" blocks (diamonds, but not flexible enough to plan a lone star quilt, for example). I do miss the fact that they have no 8-pointed quilt layout. But you can get around that with "make quilt from block".

Edit to add: You can also design "custom set" - which means drop blocks anywhere on the quilt top. My only complaint with this option is that you have to drag the size of the block you want - and I can't get it to force a square (like you can do in powerpoint), so getting the block size correct is hard in my opinion.

Note that I have not gone completely through the manual. It's possible some of my issues are addressed in there.