What is the purpose of a quilt label?  In its most basic form, a label identifies the maker of the quilt.  But taken a step further, it can also provide valuable documentation for future generations.  When was the quilt made?  Where?  Why?  For whom?  What about the quilt itself?  Does it have a name?  Is it an original design or was it made from a pattern?  Did anyone else contribute to the making of this quilt?

A label that says:

Made with love by Grandma

doesn’t give nearly as much information as one that says:

For Julie Marie Smith Baker
born June 30, 2011 in Whitby, Ontario
7 lbs. 2 oz.
“Sweet Dreams”
pattern by Sydney Parkridge, Easy Baby Quilts
Made with love by Grandma
Mary Jo Smith
Ancaster, Ontario

What a difference!  The second label answers all our questions about when, where, why and for whom the quilt was made while clearly identifying the maker and designer of the quilt.

Assuming the label will be produced by printing or transferring onto fabric, this information must be arranged and formatted for print.  There are many ways you can design a label on your computer, using software you may already have.

This first example was created using Microsoft Word – word processing software.  The text was enhanced by using two fonts (Curlz MT and Garamond) in different sizes and colors.  Borders and shading were added to change the background color for printing on a white pre-treated fabric sheet.  A couple of clipart motifs add to the theme of a baby quilt made with love by her grandmother.

Microsoft Publisher has many features that can be used to create quilt labels.  This example began with the “Art Boxes” Postcard design and the “Spice” color scheme.  The text was reformatted using the fonts “Forte” and “Bookman Old Style” and the clipart images were changed to baby carriages.  The background was left white.

I often use CorelDraw to design my quilt labels.  This full function drawing and graphics program offers unlimited creative options.  This example uses a clipart image of a baby block as the background with the text formatted to fit on each side.  Wouldn’t it look sweet appliquéd on the back of a quilt?  

The Electric Quilt Company produced a tutorial about making quilt labels with EQ7.  The label is designed as if it were a quilt using the “Set Appliqué Text” tool to format the text.  The “Set Auto Borders” tool offers an extensive collection of pre-designed borders to frame the label and the “Paintbrush” tool allows all the elements to be filled with “fabric” or solid colors.

It is also possible to purchase collections of pre-designed quilt labels.  Virtual Quilt Labels Plus includes 110 color designs that can be edited in a drawing program.  C&T Publishing’s Quilt Label Collective CD Volume 1 offers over 150 designs than can be customized by hand or on your computer.  Victoriana Quilt Designs generously provides a free selection of quilt labels on their website.  The HP Custom Quilt Label Kit, announced in 2002, does not seem to be available any longer directly from HP but there might be other sites that still carry it.

It doesn’t matter what tool you choose to create your quilt label.  What matters is that you finish your quilt properly by giving it the documentation it deserves.  Future generations will thank you for leaving behind this precious legacy.

There are many ways to go about tracing from a photograph, but I would like to show you how EQ7 – the popular quilt design software from The Electric Quilt Company – can help.

Let’s start with this picture of a daylily.  It can be found in the EQ7 photo library.

EQ7 has a feature that allows us to change the color depth in a photo.  Color depth is expressed in bits per pixel.  The more bits per pixel, the more colors that can be displayed.  This photo, at 24 bits per pixel, can represent 16,777,216 different colors!  But if we reduced the color depth to 4 bits per pixel, only 16 different colours would be displayed.  This would certainly make the photograph much easier to trace.

From the Image worktable in EQ7, choose “Increase/Decrease Color Depth…” from the IMAGE menu.  Decrease the bits per pixel to 4 and click OK.  The daylily photo now looks like this.  Can you see how much easier it would be to trace each individual shade of color in this altered photograph?

We can trace using EQ7 as well.  Save the altered daylily photo to your Sketchbook and then edit on the Block worktable.  It will appear on the “Tracing Image” tab, where you can adjust how light or dark you would like it to be.

Begin by tracing all the elements of one color that appear furthest away in the photo – in this case, the bright red flower petals.  Notice how three of the petals appear to overlap the other three.  Tracing the underneath petals first makes the process easier.

Here are the six flower petals colored.  Can you see now the importance of overlapping the petals in the correct order?

What’s next?  I would say the second darker shade of red.

Here is the colored version.

Continue tracing one color at a time, working from back to front, until the entire photo has been traced.

Here’s how it could look in a quilt!

EQ7 can also help with constructing your pictorial quilt.  Print the block as an appliqué pattern to any size, tiling over multiple pages if necessary.

You can also print templates for each patch.

Not comfortable with drawing on your computer?  It does take a little practice – and a graphics tablet doesn’t hurt either!  You can still use EQ7 to help you design your pictorial quilt.  Just print the photo after reducing the color depth and trace it by hand.

Scanning Fabric
To create an electronic version of real life fabric in your stash, you can scan it and import the file into EQ7.  Lay the fabric on your scanner bed and scan using your scanner software.

Set the resolution to 72 or 75 and crop the scanned image to approximately 3″ x 3″, following the pattern repeat in the fabric as closely as possible for best results.  Save as a jpg or bmp file.

Fabric on the Internet
In addition to scanning fabric yourself, you can also find images of fabric swatches on the internet.  These can be saved to your computer as a jpg or bmp file by right-clicking on the image and choosing “Save Picture As…”. 

Most fabric manufacturers and on-line retail stores display images of fabric on their websites.  Moda Fabrics, however, has gone one step further.  They provide the option to download jpg images of their fabric collections with a simple mouse click.

Importing Fabric into EQ7
Once you have fabric saved as a jpg or bmp file (gif, png, and tiff are also supported), the file can be imported into EQ7.  Go to the Fabric Library and click Import>From Image Files.  Select the fabric files to import and click Open.  The new fabric swatches are now ready to be added to your Sketchbook.

FAB Fabric Files
Computer files in the format .fab are fabric files that are formatted for EQ software.  Once these files are saved and linked to EQ, they are available directly from the Fabric Library.

Connecting Threads provides FAB files for their latest fabric collections.  Download and extract the zipped file, then save the FAB file in My Documents\My EQ7\user on your hard drive.  The fabric will appear in “My Libraries” in the Fabric Library.

The Electric Quilt Company also offers free FAB fabric files to download.  A new collection is added each month, with each FAB file containing six months.  Download and save the FAB file in My Documents>Monthly Libraries on your hard drive.  Once this folder is linked to EQ, the fabric will appear beneath the pre-loaded EQ7 fabrics in the Fabric Library.

STASH
If all that is not enough, you can purchase even more EQ fabrics.  STASH Fall 2010 includes over 4600 new fabrics from 28 different fabric manufacturers.  Imagine!

Swath Tool
This tool is found on the Appliqué tab in the Block Worktable.  Here’s how it works.  You draw a path…

and then EQ7 fills in the path with either diamonds…

or flying geese!  Pretty cool, right?

I read an article about curved flying geese that stated they were quite easy to construct using paper foundation piecing.  Paper foundations are available from the Print Menu, so I checked to see how EQ7 would handle this curved flying geese unit.  Beautiful!

Serendipity Tools
These tools are found in the Block Menu.  EQ6 included three serendipity tools (which I may have noticed before, but just forgot):  Frame Block, Tilt Block, and Merge Blocks.  EQ7 adds four more and they’re pretty fun.

Click & Flip Blocks
This tool takes the top left corner of a block and flips it around to create new combinations.  Watch what it does with this Maltese Cross block.

Shrink & Flip Blocks
This tool shrinks a block to one quarter and uses that to create new combinations.  Here’s what happens with an Hourglass block.

Kaleidoscope Blocks
This one is very cool.  It uses a triangular portion of a block to create new combinations.  Here’s our Maltese Cross block again, followed by an Orange Peel block.  Amazing!

Fancy Star Blocks
This tool fits a block into a diamond shape, and uses those diamonds to create a star.  You can choose how many points in the star – between 5 and 10.  Here are the same two blocks in an eight-pointed star.

There’s a lot more to see and do in EQ7 – these are just a few highlights.  If you would like to learn how to use this amazing quilt design software, watch for my fall schedule and two EQ7 classes coming soon.

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?