EQ8 Tutorial Tuesday- how to write a quilt pattern with EQ and MS word!

I’m trying to get back into my Tutorial Tuesday posts, where I post an EQ tutorial every other Tuesday! I’d like to do more videos but we’re still waiting on fiber optic internet so for now I’ll do screenshots, which is actually tricky in wordpress, just takes a bit longer.

I often see this question posted online, in designer FB groups or other places and I figured I’d show (again) how I design quilt patterns in EQ and MS word!

Here’s a star quilt I made that’s made using the star blocks for the QAL I’m doing currently.

In the block worktable it looks something like this

Under the print/export tab, click export and you’ll see “metafile” as an option, click that!

You’ll get a popup looking like this, you choose the quality -medium is fine for a pattern, I also choose FILL only, if you do outline and fill and have to move the shapes you only move the fill or the outline, so I just choose the fill (for now) and if I’m writing the pattern at the same time I just copy to clipboard.

Then open up MS word and paste it in there and it looks like this- it colors everything in a solid color that matches the fabrics.

right now it’s a solid piece! Right click and select Group/ungroup

select yes to the popup box

now it changed! it has a box around it, that you can move and resize and expand!

I expanded it to show here, then I click inside the box and select ALL

Now before I move pieces around I NOW outline the pieces in black, it’s especially good if I have white or a light color on the blocks. Click on formate and shape outline and select black.

Now you can see the black outline on the white parts!

and now you can drag around the pieces and delete some of them, I usually copy and paste the whole block from this point and leave it in my document until the pattern is written.

I might write the pattern like this:

1. Sew two small half square triangles to sides of a white quarter square triangle. Make 4 per block. And have the little drawing next to it.

You don’t have to separate everything in the block, after this step I might show the flying geese with the corner squares and the center block.

Here’s a snippet of my pattern “Nighttime by the river” that we are using for the QAL

and you continue on and keep saving!

another tip is to get pdfwriter it’s a free program you download and once it’s installed, you can save your word doc as a pdf. in EQ8 you can also set the pdfwriter as your printer, so if you have a block or maybe a foundation pattern you want to include, you “print” it as a pdf and then save the file.

If you then want to save it and add it to the end of a word doc turned into a pdf, go to pdfmerge.com and upload files and merge them together into ONE pdf…. at least that’s what I do, I don’t have subscriptions to any adobe programs, so this is my workaround.

Hope it helps some of you!