Lucky for me I got my EQ7 Upgrade yesterday and I had some time to install it and poke around in it a bit. So far, it's running much more smoothly than my EQ6, which seemed to have issues with my hardware or wasn't playing nice with everything else loaded on the computer. There are so many new fabrics, blocks, and quilt layouts and I think there are a lot more customization tools available for designing - I haven't scratched the surface yet.
But I did come up with this design for the challenge quilt. It's a small quilt, only 42 inches on a side, but it will be a challenge to get it all pieced for Monday's meeting. If I can get the top done by bedtime on Friday night, I may actually have the thing quilted and done by monday. Who knows?
The brown in the triangles represents the challenge fabric - a brown/beige/purple paisley fabric that our guild leader "hated".
The overall design is a Garden Patch framework (one of the included quilt layouts) with some variable block sizes. EQ7 now adjusts a square block to fit a triangular setting for it automatically, which created the vaguely insane pieced triangle blocks. They are actually rather pedestrian square blocks: Kings Chain and 6-Grid Chain. The remaining blocks are Framed 9-Patch and 3-inch squares of fabric. I haven't tried distorted blocks like this yet, and I'm hoping it will give an optical illusion effect of a curved surface.
I probably could have chosen better colors, but I am in a hurry so I pulled stash fabric rather quickly. There will be progress and completion photos later on. I am paper piecing the 4 large triangles, and that is proving to be time consuming. I only completed one tonight. I'm not planning to paper piece the outer triangles of the garden patch sections, because I think I can construct them with strip piecing and some half-rectangle triangles, so the rest of the top should go together more quickly.
That is beautiful! And here's hoping that everything goes together just right and you get it done in time.
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