Tutorial Tuesday- writing a pattern with EQ

I read on Michele’s blog that she finally got or is getting EQ7.

I’m SEW happy for her – I think I’m an enabler when it comes to quilting, she just recently bought the same long arm machine as me….

I was thinking about a “theme” for this tutorial and someone else had asked me about IF EQ “spits” out the directions like when you purchase a pattern and the answer is NO, well YES –sort of.

Let me show you how.

Here I created a simple baby quilt in pink, using a HST block and birds in the air (search for those if you want to copy this)

I know most of you know how to create the quilt and change block sizes and color the quilt etc.

This layout is 5 x 6 blocks (42” x 48”)

Now go to PRINT/ fabric yardage and you see this

(don’t print it just look at it)

BTW I leave my fabric width to 40” just to be safe.

Often you just look at the yardage and that’s it, but it shows NUMBER of patches too, so here the dark pink shows 90. Let’s check that by looking at the quilt above.

Each block has 6 triangles and there’s 15 of those blocks so YES that’s 90

The white below it shows 49, but that’s because with 3 x 15 blocks = 45 PLUS 4 strips for the border

The Pink and the other white shows 34 pink, which is 30 triangles PLUS 4 for the border

and 15 white

Now go back to the quilt and SELECT the birds of the air block and click PRINT/ rotary cutting

You just get the cutting directions for ONE block

So when it reads 6 patches for the dark pink, you have to multiply by 15 so that’s 90- LIKE the cutting number by the yardage!!

this is a way of double checking that you have enough or calculated correctly!!

Let me show you the other block before I show how I would write the directions.

You can “print” the other block’s cutting directions too like this, or just by looking at the previous block it should be the same for the large triangle

Again here it just shows to cut 1 patch, but it should be 15 pink and 15 white, BUT since you are cutting 15 of the pink for the other blocks too it’s just 30.

Now if the blocks were an EVEN number I might have written the directions to cut 6 7/8” squares or even 7” squares and mark a DIAGONAL with a pencil and sew 1/4” on either side, then trim down to 6 1/2” (that would equal 6” when sewn together) Or write it like this and ignore the left over triangle(s) from both blocks.

So here’s my directions:

(I always round up my yardage to the nearest 1/4yd)

Yardage:

Dark pink 1/2yd     White #1 1/2yd

Pink 1 3/4yds    White#2 1/2yd

Binding fabric 1/2yd   Backing 48” x 56” OR 3yds

Batting 46” x 54”

-SIDE NOTE- I’ll quickly show how I calculate binding yardage, first I add up the size of the quilt so 42+48X2=180in / 35 =5.14 so 6 strips x 2.5” = 15” so make that 1/2yd…

*Why divide by 35? just because when I make binding strips that are 2 1/2” wide I cut off the ends at a diagonal so that’s about 5” loss total from 40” wide.

Now to the cutting directions

Dark pink: cut (4) WOF’s 2 7/8” wide, sub-cut into (45) 2 7/8” squares and cut diagonally into 90 triangles

(I calculated 3 squares for each block –cut diagonally to make 6 triangles, 3” squares x 3 x 15 blocks  = 135” / 40” wide fabric = 3 .38 so 4 strips)

Pink: Cut (3) WOF 6 7/8” wide, sub-cut into (15) 6 7/8” triangles and cut diagonally into 30 triangles

(Again 7” x 15 squares = 105” / 40” = 2.6 so 3 strips)

White#1: Cut (2) 2 7/8” WOF strips, cut into (23) 2 7/8” squares and cut diagonally into 45 triangles – discard the last triangle

(3 triangles x 15 blocks/2 for the squares= 22.5 so 23. 23 x 3”=69 / 40”= 1.7 so 2 strips)

White#2: Cut (2) 6 7/8” WOF strips, sub cut into (8) 6 7/8” squares, cut diagonally into 15 triangles –discard last triangle)

(15 triangles = 8 squares x 7” =56” /40” =1.4 strips =2 strips)

 

Now you can also double check the yardage

I’ll just do the dark pink and white#2

dark pink was 3/8yd- 1/2yd

4 WOF strips 3” wide = 12” could almost fit 1/4yd but I see why it picked 3/8″yd = 13.5”

White#2 was 1/2yd

2 WOF strips 7” wide = 14”, 1/2yd =18” so that fits too

I’m sure you can figure out how to write about how to sew the blocks together and double check measurements and see which way to logically iron the seams i.e. toward dark fabrics.

And borders are easy to look up too

 

If you have any other tips or tricks, feel free to post them below, this is just how I figure it out and that’s a thing I love about EQ too, the challenge of figuring out the cutting directions like this.

Have fun