craftyjulz

I’ve had my EQ7 for a few years but have only designed one easy quilt with it & have found it to be a frustrating program even though I’m pretty computer savvy. My biggest problem right now I have is the difficulty with printing 12” foundation pieced blocks. In EQ8 have they fixed it where you can rotate the pieces to better place them on the paper to print? I’m still on the fence about upgrading. Do you have any suggestions of the best videos that show you the differences between EQ7 & EQ8?

eparys

Hopefully others will jump in here with their opinions as well, but I will start. I was not a fan of the upgrade. I bought it when it was first released. When I started using it, I hated it. I have grown to like it now. Some things that I like is the rotation in foundation printing and when coloring blocks, if you go back and remove a seam the colors stay put and are not shuffled. There are several other features that make it easier to work with such as in the Print Foundation dialogue the grouped pieces are colored.

I find the new interface cluttered looking, however, and the pane that has the tools in them is large. You can choose in properties to have smaller tools or to dock the pane to either the right or the left but I have not found a setting in properties to make it smaller. I am now comfortable where everything is and for the most part am glad I went ahead and did the update as a lot of what I do is paper piecing.

Back to EQ8 Upgrade - It is all about the $$ in my mind. While the upgrade is nice, 7 is still a good program with a few workarounds. When I used EQ7 exclusively, I found (as you have noted) that the program printed the blocks the same orientation as they are shown in the quilt. What I did to get around that is to create a second quilt with identical sized blocks. If my real quilt was on point, I often found the foundation spread across four pages.So, I created another smaller quilt horizontally and placed my blocks in that quilt and printed from there. Then before I printed I could change the groupings so that they were smaller or move them around to minimize the amount of taping. Then, for the most part, the groups were straight on the page and not too large.

While I did not find a video,if you go to the page as if to purchase the update,
https://electricquilt.com/online-sho.../#tab-Features
then click on the features tab half way down that page, all the new features are listed there. Good luck with your decision.

quiltingshorttimer

hmm..QB and I seem to be having issues tonight--so here is the post that I thought got posted! Yes, EQ8 allows you to more and rotate the template pieces. I frankly find the EQ8 much easier to use after the initial learning curve. While I worked for the last 25 years with computers daily, including 2 different complex scheduling programs, I found EQ7 not easy to use. I like EQ8 better and have used it more. I did invest in the lesson books offered by EQ for both EQ7 &EQ8--they are very good and become great reference books.

craftyjulz

I have a question. I’m building a quilt with 12” blocks, all different, but every one of them is going to be surrounded by a 1” border in a variety of colors. I would prefer to design my blocks on a 12” worktable & add the 1” border in later. It’s also going to have sashing so I can’t add the borders that way or is there a way to do more than one thing of sashing? I see under Serendipity there’s a “Frame block” & I chose the smallest option but I don’t see it being able to be adjusted to 1”. Also, does that cut down the interior of my block so it’s no longer 12” because it adds it with the frame to the final choice of block size? I hope what I’m saying is making sense. Should I just make my blocks 13” & add the border around it myself so the size comes out accurately? I’ve already made most the blocks, not from EQ7 but on my own & am going to try to go back & draw & add them into the program. They’re almost all paper pieced so that’s another problem. If the program skews the inches off if I add the frame then any foundation I print will be off for next time so it’s imperative the blocks stay at 12”.
I am going to try to upgrade to EQ8 after playing around with 7 for the last week & working through one of the books. 7 just has too many glitches where I’ve suddenly been missing lines or things won’t select without me having to refresh. Thanks for any help in advanced. I’m a real newbie at EQ but am pretty computer smart so hopefully I can figure it out with a little assistance here. Maybe someone knows of a tutorial or video even?

eparys

I would use the "merge" option rather than "frame the block". First create a separate block 14x14 with the one inch border only. Then merge the two together. You should get what you want that way.

craftyjulz

Wow. So elegantly simple. Thank you!

QuiltnNan

Wow! Thanks for talking about Serendipity... I have never gone there and I can't tell you how many timnes that would have been useful!

craftyjulz

It’s early for Christmas but I got my EQ8 gift from my mom since she had to use my name & info for an upgrade instead of straight out buying it on its own. She did it now because during cyber Monday they had a 20% off sale. I’m sew happy with it already. I do have to wait for Christmas for the book about designing quilts with it though. It’s not as different from EQ7 as I thought it would be so the transition has been pretty smooth.

LaurMac

I use EQ8 and think that it's really made the program much easier to use with many more options visible on the (for example) block worktable - It's really easy to draw your own new york beauty or other blocks that have triangles on an arc. I keep EQStitch and use it for embroidery designs. The Facebook group for Electric Quilt users has very knowledgeable and helpful people on it who always answer questions and their support team at EQ is wonderful. One thing I would recommend is that after you save a project, also go to File-Export Image and save an image of the quilt with almost the same name (ie. if the project is Christmas18, then one image could be Christmas18_runner, another could be Christmas18_treequilt1, etc...) The reason I know is that when I'm looking for an old quilt from EQ5, I have to almost open every project in order to search for the quilt!!

LaurMac

"Looking for help with a panel. I am trying to create a quilt around a panel and can’t seem to figure out if EQ8 can even do this. Many thanks."
A friend of mine was at a panel workshop and the advice there was to think about what your next border would be and the size and then trim the panel to the correct size - even if you are cutting off several inches.