I have been using EQ7 to design original blocks for many of my quilt designs for Quilt Design a Day (Qdad).  Each of us has committed to designing a quilt a day.  I joined originally for fun, but now I am very serious about continuing.  The discipline of designing every day has improved my designs and increased my creativity.  It has also made me a much better EQ7 user.  We get our inspiration from the two photos and their color palettes on Design Seeds.  I then convert the palettes to Kona Cottons using PaletteBuilder.  You can see my tutorial on Creating Custom Palettes on my Tutorials page.

I use EQ7’s Serendipity function (Block>Serendipity) to design many of my quilts.  I usually I start with a some kind of representation inspired by the Design Seeds photo and palette.  For example, this week we had an orange slice as the inspiration photo and palette.

I started by drawing a block, in Easy Draw,  which was a very literal translation of the inspiration photo:

Next I decided to see what would happen if I used EQ7  Serendipity to change the block.  I went to Block>Serendipity> Shrink and Flip.  EQ7 then shrinks the hi-lighted block (on the left) and combines it with three copies of itself.

 The flags below the main picture determine the direction the 4 shrunk blocks will take.  I look at each block and decide if I want to keep it.  When I want to keep a block, I press the Add to Sketchbook button.  Look at the quilt below and notice that I placed the Design 3 blocks in the center, Design 1 blocks in the inner pieced border, and Design 4 blocks around the perimeter.  All of the blocks have the same components arranged differently.

The same thing can be accomplished with graph paper, crayons (or colored pencils/markers, etc).  Draw the original block, make copies, either by hand or photocopied, color them, cut them apart and rearrange.  I would take a photo of your design when you are done.  One tool which you might find useful is the Dritz design mirror.  It is a two mirror set which you can set by your design to see what it would look like multiplied.  It is thrilling!!!

Have a quilty day!!