EQ8

I upgraded my EQ7 to the new EQ8 program and have been looking around the new program a bit. It does look quite different but is very intuitive. This is important to me as I do not like reading manuals.

So I drew my favourite block...bit rusty on this so just used the easy draw facility and drew 'An Arrangement of Small Pieces' as a 9in block, then coloured it, saved a copy and went on to explore the export options. Same as before, you can copy to Windows clipboard or export as a Windows Metafile. I had issues with that in the last program, particularly when trying to use this as a piecing diagram where you draw individual units out of the block.

Happy to say, this worked very well (could just be that I finally figured out how to do this properly!)

So I exported the block using the Clipboard option, then opened my Serif Drawing program and pasted the block in there, then ungrouped the block, so I could pick the individual units up. As I copied this with outline and fill, I then had to click on the units, and grouped the fill and outline together before moving the piece. This allows you to create a nice little piecing diagram. As I am in my drawing program I could now have added text or arrows etc. to demonstrate the piecing of the block.

Looked at the Rotary Cutting Chart (rounding to 1/8in or 1/16in)
Here is a snapshot

...and also looked at the Foundation Piecing option which now comes out coloured (if you want)

All very interesting...lots of little changes. The navigation around the program will take me a while to get used to, but overall a much more user friendly experience.

Curious to see what else I find. There are a lot of new features to explore, like you can now take pictures of your fabric to use in your quilt...need to get on to that as I find it very useful to use the fabric that I am actually using when designing a quilt. This could be much easier than the scanning that I have done before.
Head over to the Electric Company website if you want to know more about this upgrade.

Karin