I have been busy playing around with my computer design program this week. It’s long been a dream of mine to take my original quilt ideas and turn them into published patterns.
Here’s one of the first quilts I designed in EQ7, my Jolly Jelly Roll Quilt, which later became my first quilt-along tutorial series featuring quilts from precuts.
I was happy with it but during the tutorial I slightly modified the borders, and used different fabrics for the actual quilt.
However, until recently, I didn’t know how to change my digital design to reflect the pattern updates.
I finally had an “a-ha” moment when I realized I could take image files of my fabrics, upload them to the program and then use them to design quilts with current fabrics. Now fabric choices are limitless!
This is what I’ve come up with now – quilt designs that reflect the actual sewing pattern, using Jelly Rolls that I currently have on hand. I went a little crazy and designed 4 of them in one day. I could have kept going with other ideas except that I had to stop to eat and sleep!
I am offering these as quilt kits in my store until they sell out. Then I’ll design some more!
Working on my do-it-yourself-quilt tutorials has definitely helped me grow as a designer. By blogging about my quilts on a weekly basis, I can take a large project and break it down into smaller steps and actually feel like I’m accomplishing something.
Now I’m off to design my next tutorial. (This is almost as much fun as the actual sewing!)
Just in case you’re interested, here are links to the three full tutorials I’ve done so far:
Feel free to quilt-along with me any time!
Christa Quilts 
Your designing patterns on your computer with the jelly roll are so awesome, Christa! You are a genius, really!
So I just got EQ7 a few weeks ago, I am a master in Photoshop and pretty good in Illustrator, but I feel defeated by EQ7 hahaha, I am a mac user so I am using VMware to connect to Windows 8 to use it. A lot of my quilt designs are not based on a block layout and I am still trying to figure out the custom layout feature. I am also still trying to figure out how to draw my blocks properly. I ordered Pieced Drawing Book from EQ for 50%off its for EQ6, but its says it works fine for EQ7. I am going to try and read up on that and get better. If you start getting really good at it I would LOVE LOVE LOVE some EQ7 tutorials to help 🙂 I subscribe to your emails, I don’t always get time to comment, but just wanted to let you know that I do read your posts and just love it 🙂
Very cool! It is a mammoth but it can do some pretty cool stuff. I’m just figuring out how to use the custom set quilts also. I basically designed a block using the graph paper tool and then imported is as a custom set to make my patterns. It’s like electronic graph paper once I figured it out!! Now I just need to learn Photoshop and Illustrator better.