Escape to the Islands Word Art Quilt

Last week I shared how to use Electric Quilt 8 as graph paper to create your own block alphabet.  And then use your graph paper quilt as a guide to draw the blocks in EasyDraw. 

​For this weeks quilt, you will want to go back and draft a few of the letters.  To save time, just pick the ones that you will use in your quilt.  No need to do them all.

Block Alphabet EQ8 Tutorial

Here are the EasyDraw blocks you will need for a "beach" quilt.  All of them have a finished size of 3" x 5".

Fabric for the Beach Quilt

Each month, Electric Quilt produces a new free fabric collection that we can download and use in our Electric Quilt projects.  The August 2022 collection is Island Vibes II.  It was designed by Linda Hahn for Banyan Batiks.  Just click on the picture and follow the instructions to download this collection to your computer and load it into EQ8.

Once the fabric collection is in your Electric Quilt library,  add it to your Block Alphabet project (the project you set up last week).

Beach Quilt

I decided to put a spacer of 1/2" and borders of 1" around each of the letters for the beach quilt.  The good news is this is very easy to do.  In the video, I will show you how to draft a "merge" block. 

​It is super important to have only snap to grid turned on when drafting this block.  If snap to grid wasn't turned on, the lines for the rectangle in the center will not be perfect horizontal and vertical lines and the block will not be considered an appropriate block to accept another block.

For your quilt layout, you can choose between a quilt with a horizontal layout or one with a vertical layout.  It all depends on the space you would like to use to display your quilt.

I am curious which layout you prefer?

Beach Quilt - Horizontal Layout by Kari Schell

Beach Quilt - Vertical Layout by Kari Schell

Of course these quilts would also work for a name -- maybe for a child or grandchild.  Here is the same quilt I did with my name.

I am looking forward to see what quilt you end up designing -- and what fabric you use for your quilt.  Feel free to post a picture in the Learning EQ Facebook group.

Escape to the Islands Learning EQ Facebook Post

On a personal note, I am looking forward to retreating with my local quilting group at the end of next week.  It is so fun to be able to get away with friends as we work on our quilts.  I just cut out a quilt to work on at the retreat.  It only has a zillion half square triangles in it -- so we will see how much I get done.

​I hope you find some quilting time this week as well.

Happy quilting.

​Kari
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