The first thing you’ll probably notice when you open EQ7 is a new worktable.  In EQ6, we had two worktables:  one for working on blocks and one for working on quilts.  In EQ7, there is now a third worktable for working on images.

EQ6 Two Worktables

EQ7 Three Worktables

What can you do on the image worktable?  Tons of stuff!  EQ7 offers the kind of image editing capabilities you find in programs such as Corel Photo-Paint and Adobe Photoshop Elements.  (See my previous articles on Printing Fabric, Part 2 and Part 4.)  You can crop, resize, and rotate.  You can adjust the colors, automatically or using the many color tools.  You can apply a wide variety of special effects. 

You can also create fabulous kaleidoscopes from your images using the circular or square symmetry tools.  This reminds me of the Kaleidoscope Kreator software I mentioned in a previous article.  All your image editing can be done within EQ7 and saved to your Sketchbook, ready to use in a quilt design.  So let’s try it.  Here’s a photo of a morning glory:

Let’s apply a square symmetry…

and change the photo into this:

Next, we’ll set the image in a quilt…

and start adding borders.  Now here’s something really neat:  the Eyedropper tool can find a matching color or a matching fabric from a color in the photo!  Isn’t that cool?

Here are a few quilt designs:

There’s one more amazing thing I have to show you.  It’s a new quilt layout called Photo Patchwork.  Here’s the morning glory photo overlaid with a square patchwork grid.

The grid doesn’t show up very well in the illustration, but watch this.  EQ7 will fill in each square with solid colors…

or with matching fabrics!

How cool is that?!  There are still more great new features in EQ7 I’d like to tell you about, but I guess they’ll have to wait until next week.  If you haven’t ordered EQ7 or your EQ7 upgrade yet, what are you waiting for?

Well, take this fruit fabric as an example.  Suppose I wanted to use it as part of a quilt label. 

Instead of sewing a border onto my label, I could scan the fabric and print it all in one.

Or, I could apply an effect called transparency.  I could continue to lighten the fabric until text would be visible on it.

This effect works really well if you want to use the same fabric as the quilt backing for your label.

Once our fabric is scanned, we can apply image editing tricks to it as well.  Take this animal fabric, for instance.

We could isolate the chicken…

We could turn him to face in the other direction…

We could turn him pink!

We could make him tall and skinny…

Or short and squat…

And we could put them all together in a funky chicken nine-patch block!

And these are just a few ideas of what you could do.

Check out this image of a barn in a field of sunflowers:

Here are just a few examples of ways the photograph can be manipulated.  I used CorelDraw to create these special effects.

And here’s a Flying Geese block done with fabric printed with this last special effect.

These next effects were created using software called Kaleidoscope Kreator.  This software has many applications, but once again, with the ability to print to fabric, these extraordinary kaleidoscopes would make amazing quilt blocks.

Here’s an eight-pointed star kaleidoscope, printed to fabric and appliquéd onto a background fabric.