Posts Tagged ‘pumpkins’

EQ8 Tutorial: Two Ways to Color; Quilt Block Mania

Written by Diane Harris on . Posted in Blog, How-tos and Ideas, Quilt Lifestyle

I’m partnering with The Electric Quilt Company to promote EQ8 design software for a couple of months, and to that end, I shot a video showing two different ways to color a design in EQ8.

If you’re unfamiliar with the software, just sit back and enjoy the view and don’t worry about feeling a little lost. When you actually have the software, you start from the very beginning and learn one small step at a time. Everything builds on something you already know!

Here, we are jumping right into the meat of things and it may feel like drinking from a fire hose! Rest assured that there’s plenty of free help to launch you into coloring, designing and playing with EQ8.

To get started, use code EQ8STASHBANDIT for 20% off everything at electricquilt.com. Doesn’t that sound like fun?

Releasing this pumpkin Log Cabin block soon! Designed in #EQ8.

Do you see those big white spaces in the quilt on the video? Here’s the plan:

In just a few more days, I’m excited to be part of Quilt Block Mania, where 30 designers will have original block designs posted on their websites at no charge. Each block uses a similar color palette and has a Halloween theme. There are some incredibly adorable designs!

Subscribe to my YouTube channel for more EQ8 video tutorials.

My block will go into one of those spaces.

A variation of the pumpkin Log Cabin. Designed in #EQ8.

But wait! There’s more! 😉

Each week, I’m going to release another companion block so that before long, you’ll have a whole set of them! And I designed it so that the other blocks in #quiltblockmania will fit in the spaces where you currently see the Log Cabin Pumpkins (a pattern which I’m also going to release).

So you’ll have lots of options and enough free quilt block patterns to keep you busy until Christmas!

Make my day and do this:

The Great Pumpkin Backstory and Giveaway

Written by Diane Harris on . Posted in Blog, Giveaways, How-tos and Ideas

Last year I had this idea: Design a Christmas quilt with giant candy canes. The candy canes would be so big they’d cover the entire quilt. I nestled them together and topped them off with a Starlite™ mint.

Prancer’s Peppermints, designed and made by Diane Harris, appeared in Quilty Nov/Dec. 2018

Quilty magazine published them as Prancer’s Peppermints in the Nov/Dec ’18 issue.

Diane’s giant pineapple “Welcome” quilt, click for free instructions!

Then I thought it might be fun to make a giant pineapple quilt, and that’s how Welcome was born.

The Great Pumpkin Quilt

Written by Diane Harris on . Posted in Blog, How-tos and Ideas

There’s a new magazine out, and it contains my favorite pumpkin quilt. Try and spot Quiltmaker Reader Favorites on the newsstand, because it’s chock-full of great stuff.

I was pleased to open it up and spot one of my designs inside. Pumpkins and Patches is as friendly and happy now as it was when first published in 2014.

Here is one of the original diagrams I created for Quiltmaker. They made a good decision to pattern it as a throw rather than as this 77″ x 101″ monster!

This quilt illustrates a couple of useful design tricks. The first one is that I exaggerated the height of the pumpkins.

I wanted to create space for interesting piecing, and I thought tall pumpkins would be more attractive than fat ones. You can usually exaggerate a design element in order to add a great deal of interest and possibility.

The other trick is seen in the stars.

Do you see how the points are kind of wonky? They are not all the same size, and the center star differs from the others. And you can probably tell that the star centers are not square, they’re rectangular.

So the design trick is simple, really: change the shape of a design element. Instead of having stars with square centers and matching points, I changed things up. The entire quilt is better than it would be if the stars were ordinary.

I imagined this quilt a little darker and with more solid-colored borders. Quiltmaker imagined it with brighter colors and a striped border! Both are fine, just different.

That happens sometimes: You submit an idea on paper, and you envision it a certain way. But then the available fabrics are different, and so the quilt turns out differently. You learn to hold your designs loosely, because once you send it out into the world, anything can happen.

Kind of like having children… 🙂

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