Black Tie Boogie - My Day!

My day is finally here. This has been such a great Blog Hop and I hope you've enjoyed seeing all the great projects...I know I have! It's hard for me to pick my favorites! Thanks Vickie and Mdm Samm for the time and effort that has gone into this successful Hop and giving me the opportunity to "strut" my stuff!

To begin....I have so many roosters and chickens it's absolutely ridiculous! I have them as figurines, vases, and plates and bowls. They are stuffed, made from sea shells, metal, ceramic, cloth, yarn, glass, wood, and paper. My collection goes from lamp shade toppers to tape dispensers! Some are funny, some are new and some are very old. I recently had to box up...(that is, use several boxes)... a number of them because I was over-run with chickens and roosters.

So....I've added more to my collection for this Hop....go figure! I thought I would make something useful and not just something to sit around waiting for me to dust it. So....I did some pot holders.

This first one was an applique design from EQ7.  It was really easy to do, very few pieces, and I machine appliqued it.

I used the circular attachment for my sewing machine and was able to stitch a perfect circle around the design. I picked one of the decorative stitches from my machine. We should all experiment and use those hundreds of  decorative stitches more. Play around and give it a try! 

For those who read my postings know how much I love to use my Serger. So for the edge I did a serged narrow rolled hem! 

A few more of my roosters welcoming the new addition.

With Thanksgiving knocking at our doors here in the United States, of course I had to do Thanksgiving potholders too!

I like to do machine embroidery so here is a happy Tom Turkey waving at you and wishing you a Happy Thanksgiving!

And a closer view...over 45,000 stitches.

I again used a decorative stitch from my sewing machine to stitch around the design and a narrow rolled hem from my Serger.

 Oops....lets look at Tom Turkey again......

He hung around a little too long!

Thanks for visiting me today during the Hop and hope you continue to have fun visiting  the other participants scheduled for today:

Stitchin by the Lake

Georgia-Girl Quilter (You are here)
In the Boon Docks
More Stars in Comanche

The complete schedule can be found HERE

Have a great week.

Happy Living! Happy Quilting!

Working in EQ7 and EQStitch

I've not done any quilting or sewing for the past week and a half but I have been intensely exploring my EQ7 and EQStitch programs.

I've had EQ7 for about a year now and have only just piddled with it here and there, only making it through about 4 of the many PDF lessons...then I wanted the new EQStitch program since I love to do embroidery. I couldn't justify buying EQStitch because of my piddling status with EQ7...but I bought it anyway...especially since it was 20% off from the The Electric Quilt Company web site.

Well I dived in...first doing ALL the PDF lessons in EQ7(which took me an entire week of studying the lessons and then exploring the program on my own). What I've found out is that it's a powerful and amazing program that I'm going to need to explore and play with quite often! For my first major project, I'm working on a stacked Flag wall hanging. I got the idea from a painting I saw last weekend when we were out to dinner. (Pics forthcoming in another blog post). But that's what it takes... exploring and practice, exploring and practice and time, time, time to do it.

So after living with EQ7 for a week I dived into the EQStitch program...a powerful and amazing embroidery digitizing program for the beginner or intermediate embroiderer. (EQStitch is a plug-in for EQ7 so you need to have EQ7 to use EQStitch). I completed ALL the PDF lessons plus the lessons from the workbook "Learning EQStitch".  

Here are some of my creations from the PDF lessons and the workbook.

This cat is from the EQ7 Block library that I converted into an embroidery design that can be stitched out.

Here is the same block design that can be used as a machine applique. The text can also be stitched out.

Ah...lovely hearts. These hearts were created using one of the awesome drawing tools...easy peasy! Pick your fill stitch and click in the center of the hearts... pick your outline stitch and click on the outline of the heart...Ta Da...that's it! Then just pick your colors and click, click, then save in your embroidery machine format.

These are some other projects I created. The potted flower and star are applique designs that I actually created from scratch using the drawing tools. The wreathmaker tool is really awesome. I freehand drew a flower, tweaked it with the awesome drawing tools, clicked the wreathmaker tool, set my parameters and wa-la...a design that can be made into a stencil, motif, or appliqued or machine embroidered.

The designs and uses are unlimited!

I also found Beaquilter who has posted several tutorials on EQ7 that have been quite helpful to me.

It has been fun playing around in the program, now I'm ready to create and sew...and experiment more with the program. Wish me luck!

Thanks for stopping by. I love to read your comments!

Happy Living! Happy Quilting!