It's Here! It's Here!

Friday, I returned from an afternoon shopping trip to find a small white box on the front porch. UPS had delivered my Electric Quilt 7 software. I was surprised last Tuesday when I received an email saying it was being shipped. I hadn't expected to get EQ7 until near the official June release date. They really meant it when they said the blog contest winners would be among the first to get EQ7.

Here's the front of the box. The rectangles across the bottom of the keyboard say: "For Beginner Quilters", "For Advanced Quilters", and "For Photo Quilters." In other words, for almost every quilter who has a personal computer.

The back of the box shows complicated-looking designs that will either scare you away or convince you that you really should go through at least some of the lessons to learn how to do some of that stuff.

Inside the box is the 272 page user manual. In the back of the user manual is the compact disc containing the software and the lessons you can read and learn from.

Flipping through the user manual, I discovered you can export metafiles of blocks and import the metafile in to Microsoft Word to create piecing diagrams. This is a wonderful tool for writing quilt patterns. I went back and checked EQ6 and guess what - it has the same capability. I really handicapped myself by never doing the EQ6 lessons.

Saturday afternoon, I installed the software. The only minor difficulty I had was it took 2 tries to activate the software. The first time I got a message about not being able to contact the EQ server. The second try worked fine, so the first attempt probably fell into an internet black hole.

I looked at the lists of lessons and videos and decided to watch the videos first, then start the lessons.

I plan to write a series of blog posts to document my journey through the EQ7 learning process, so check back to see how I'm doing and what I'm learning.