More good lessons

Finally had a chance to work on my first quilt design project today, and it was definitely a good lesson. I took the cutting instructions straight from Quilt Design Wizard. I'm not sure if it was my sewing or what, but the border pieces are barely fitting. I'm ending up "easing" the border piece onto the main piece. I've had to unpick and redo 2 seams so far. Once I was as much as a half inch off on the length. How did that happen?!

It's weird because after the first unpicking, I went back and measured and everything seemed to be the right length. I guess the seams or the thread is tweaking the borders to shrink a bit. I think next time I will cut each one at least 1/8th longer. Better to have to trim the seam than to come up short. Part of the ease problem is that the edges get off-track and then I have to redo a section where I missed one of the edges: oops. I can only imagine how frustrated I'd be if I were following directions. Good to know if I turn this into a pattern.

Weird week

The school year is coming at us full force and summer is literally moments away. How did that happen? Haven't had a chance to sew yet, but I bought and cut out most of the pieces for a table runner. Went in my sewing room last night and just looked while waiting for Reaper to start. Yesterday was lost to getting the AC in my car repaired. Already forget what happened to Monday. Suffice it to say, this is shut-down week for my husband, so my schedule is not entirely my own...

Did buy a copy of Megan Cox's The Quilter's Catalog. Got it from the library and there is so much good stuff in there I just "had" to have it for my own. I also showed off some of my quilt designs to my husband, who was ironically "complaining" that I hadn't yet made a quilt for our bed. I am taking that as "permission" to go for it. I've been hanging back partially because Quilter's Design Wizard is overwhelming me with choices and limitations (more on that later), but also because obviously it will cost more than the table runner, which so far I've spent $17 on.

So with the quilt I want for my room, I want a somewhat reversible quilt with some kind of simple yet optical illusion-ish design on the backing. I've kind of forced QDW to do a couple of entwined chains by using a couple of simple blocks and just coloring with them, but as my husband pointed out (damn him, the engineer) it is kind of a lot of work for the effect. I will have to find another design or different blocks if I actually want to be able to use the yardage feature for the quilt back. So this is a limitation of QDW that I can live with for now, and as long as I can jerry-rig it to do what I want on the screen, I can always figure it out on my own. 

A bigger limitation is not being able to do anything with the design files: you can only print them within the confines of the program. I can't, for example, make them into PDFs and display them anywhere, as I'm assuming you could do with EQ6.

Off to errands I go. After I get my car, I have to finish my newsletter draft for the STC, update the website for the soccer club I volunteer on, and then I get to quilt.

First Impression: Quilt Design Wizard

I bought a copy of Quilt Design Wizard by The Electric Quilt Company. First of all let me say "phew!" that it installed and worked on Windows Vista despite the package saying it works on XP. (As it happens, the website does say it works on both XP and Vista, but still I wish I'd checked before I tore into the package and made it unreturnable...)

Considering I was playing with it without going through the lessons or reading up much on how to use it, I was able to create a couple of interesting designs right off the bat. One frustration was not being able to find solid fabric choices, but again I haven't finished looking at all the instructions. And I also had trouble changing the border after initially picking mitered border. Still, it seems to have a bunch of interesting fabric choices and many interesting blocks. I was able to download some extra projects from the website, but thinking back on it, I may not have completely installed them, so that's something else to check. I've got my eye on Electric Quilt 6, but that will have to wait for more solvent times. In the meantime, I can have some fun with this. Too bad there isn't a function to click and have the quilt pop up in real life (dream on...)