EQ7 Tutorial Tuesday- writing a pattern

I have been asked several times if EQ can help you write a pattern!?

Of course it can!! it doesn’t do it for you, but it helps a LOT!

Here’s how I often do it.

I start with a simple layout (or whatever you want the quilt to look like, just for this I’m doing it simple)

a rails and pinwheel block quilt

It’s a 5 x 7 block layout and each block is 8”

So that’s 18 blocks of the rail block and 17 of the pinwheel blocks

If you click on the printer icon at the top and select fabric yardage, you’ll see how much fabric you’ll need

(minus binding and backing)

also if you click on a block, you can print rotary cutting directions

I often ignore this box, but here it shows the block name, the size you have (which you can change by selecting custom size)

Print key, round to nearest 1/8 or 1/16” (I keep it at 1/8”) and I just select preview for pattern writing

I know the math is a little odd here and that’s something you may want to change so it’s not ending in 7/8” so maybe 6” blocks??

But for now I’ll keep it at 8”

here’s the pinwheel block

Now you could have just as easily done a foundation pattern, but here it’s just HUGE and it’s pretty easy to rotary cut.

Now to the pattern writing part.

I do this in MS Word.

I would write the title of the quilt, the finished size and block size, then the materials list

I rounded up some of the yardage, and the batting I made 6-8” larger and the backing larger than that. The binding I calculated, 48” +64” x 2, then divided by 35 (which is about how long I get some one WOF strip sewn at a diagonal on both ends, that was 6.4, so rounding up to 7 strips x 2.5” is 17.5 so 1/2yd should be fine.

I’ll start with the rail block and since it’s just strips, I think cutting WOF strips and sewig them together before trimming is best, but that’s up to you- the pattern writer

and we need 18 blocks with 2 “sets” in each block that are 4 1/2” long by 1 7/8”

4 1/2” go into 40” WOF 8.88 times, so 8 from each strip to be safe.

and I need 36 total so 5 strips is good.

(You can double check the yardage now with 5 x 2” =10” so 1/2yd =18” is plenty, 1/4yd would be too close so 3/8yd = 13.5” is actually right on!)

So here’s how I would write the pattern:

Now the pinwheel block

Here I chose to write it where you cut squares, draw a line on the back of one diagonally, then sew on each side of it and THEN cut apart, as HST blocks often gets skewed when sewing the triangles together.

But again that’s up to you, and you may want to write the rotary cutting instead or write that you can use a GO! die to cut!?

Then you continue with the border cutting and directions and how many strips of binding to cut.

Pretty simple!

I’ll show more next time with more complicated blocks!