Dreams of Dear Jane

Just putting it out there on the record, but I've gone ahead and bought the Dear Jane add-on for Electric Quilt 8. My excuse is that they were having a sale, and I've always always wanted to make one of these quilts. Not that I need an excuse, but there it is anyway, more of an explanation. The original book came out in 1996, back when I was first imprinting on quilts and quilt styles as a newbie quilter.

I think I'm really drawn to the sampler sort of quilt in general, they are fun to do and fun to look at. They're more bite-sized and attainable than some of the other big quilts out there. For instance, I really really love big Storm at Sea quilts, but I know I won't ever be able to make that many of one block. Not exactly boring, just not for me, I need more variety or the challenge of making so many different blocks I guess. Thankfully there's a lot of quilts out there to be made for everyone, right?

The main thing to me about this quilt is those awesome pieced border triangles, the look of those has always gotten to me, they're just so different than the normal thing used. I honestly am not sure about the final scallop border, but obviously that's a long way off to be deciding the final steps at this point. When I haven't made a single block yet. Maybe I should just make the border triangles all by themselves? 

There are so many different versions out there in all sorts of fabric styles and so on. I know for sure is that I'm not going to use reproduction era fabrics. Not my ideal color palette to spend that much time with. I was looking at all the other finished ones that are out there, and found a Tula Pink version which is Very Rainbow-y. 

My first idea is to do a version all in my hand-dyed and surface-designed fabrics. I think I will make up a couple blocks this way and see how it looks to me. Make visual decisions visually, right?

Perhaps I will do an all Tula Pink and my hand-dyes version. I thought that was a pretty great combination for the City Sampler 100 blocks quilt. But I used up a lot of hand-dyes to make it, so I'll have to dye some more...and that's one of the things I want to do next year. Adding on another reason to actually dye something to my very long list. I think one of the coolest things about the Dear Jane quilt is the use of prints, so I probably will use prints (or very textured dyed fabrics) in the same places.

EQ8 Confessions

A major announcement: I finally installed my copy of Electric Quilt 8!! 

I bought it for myself back in November 2017 from MassDrop (RIP MassDrop). And then it just slipped my mind. I'm not sure exactly why, probably has a lot to do with having bought it in the immediate post-hip replacement surgery time. A lot of stuff came and went and I legitimately do not remember a lot of it at all (terrifyingly real).

Anyways, the box got put away with a stack of books. I found the box a year ago. And I didn't install it at the time, because I had some issues with space on my laptop. I finally got that resolved and had room. Then my next excuse was because I thought the program was on a disc, and my laptop doesn't have a disc drive. We have one that plugs in, but I kept putting it off because I had to go find it and plug it in and make it work. Wild how the procrastination just piles on itself huh? 

Over the summer I signed up for a couple EQ8 related classes at QuiltCon 2021 as a way to make myself install and learn this program after all this time. They recently sent out the class supply lists and I was reminded that hey...I need to install this program and actually get some facility with it before going into a class to learn something else about using it.

But as I wrote about yesterday, friend Jaye sent me a link to an EQ 7 and Cricut project, and it made me get the actual box out.

Here it is, and look, on the back, a coffee cup stain! This box has been around here 3 years.

 And what do you know, once I actually opened the box, lo and behold, it's a digital install, no disc. Just easy peasy, took all of five minutes once I got signed in on the website. So now, down to learning...

Cricut and Electric Quilt Applique

 

Friend Jaye sends me interesting links about using the Cricut for quilting stuff. And this time it was about using Electric Quilt 8 appliqué images with the Cricut. I thought it would be worth the time to give it a try. I chose the fabrics, all prints, except the grey and very light grey and ironed on some lightweight fusible web on the back. I downloaded the file at the link and imported it into the Cricut design space software as an .svg file. I resized it in the program (didn't have to use Inkscape this time) and was ready to cut in moments.

I misread the instructions and chose as the material fusible fabric, so the tool recommended was the knife blade instead of the rotary cutter. That led to this lovely disaster. Luckily no cuts were actually made in the material before it got all bunched up. 

I smoothed it out, chose cotton fusible and with the rotary cutter all was well.

It's funny to me that after the cuts have been made, it's very hard to see that anything has happened right up until you peel back the background and see what's left behind on the mat. You will note that I removed the backing paper and stuck this fusible side down on the mat. Sticky meet sticky.

All the parts got cut out with no problems, I used the picture of the final project to arrange the pieces in the right order.

Pretty cute, huh? Now to fuse it down and stitch the edges. I really like the prints that I chose. 

And also now to install my copy of Electric Quilt 8 and see what other appliqué images are available.