I Thought I Knew EQ8… Then I Took the EQ At Home Beginner Class

Disclosure: Electric Quilt provided me with complimentary access to the EQ At Home Beginner Class in exchange for an honest review. All opinions and experiences shared here are my own.

I’ve been using Electric Quilt for years.

I’m completely self-taught, and over that time I’ve figured out enough to design blocks, make quilts, create layouts and generally get EQ8 to do what I need it to do.

Which apparently also means I’ve spent years doing some things the very long way. 🤦‍♀️

I recently worked my way through the EQ At Home Beginner class, and I honestly wasn’t sure how much I’d get out of beginner training because I already have a decent foundational knowledge of the program.

Turns out: quite a lot.

There were multiple occasions during this class where I actually stopped what I was doing because I’d just discovered a shortcut, tool or feature that I had absolutely no idea existed.

And some of them are going to completely change the way I work in EQ.

The shortcuts alone were worth it

One of my biggest takeaways was learning just how much you can do using Ctrl/Cmd and Alt/Option.

I’ve spent years manually placing blocks into quilts.

YEARS.

Then I learned that Ctrl on Windows or Cmd on Mac can be used to populate multiple blocks, while Alt/Option can work with alternating positions.

And the same modifier keys keep appearing throughout EQ.

They work with rotating blocks.

They work with colouring.

They work with the spray can.

They work in on-point layouts — which happens to be my favourite quilt setting.

Every time Jenny showed another use for them I could practically hear all the hours of my life I’d spent clicking individual squares floating away in the distance. 😂

Learning that I can colour multiple patches at once might genuinely be one of my favourite things I learned in the entire class.

There were so many little things hiding in plain sight

Another thing I enjoyed was discovering features that have apparently been sitting there waiting for me while I’ve completely ignored them.

There’s a Hide/Show Patch Lines option! 🤯

It lets you look at the quilt without all of those hard piecing lines showing, which gives you a much better sense of what the finished quilt will actually look like.

I also finally learned what the little book-with-glasses icon does and how to use the Project Sketchbook.

Again: it’s been sitting there all this time.

I just apparently decided it was decorative. 🤦‍♀️

The Notecard feature was another one I’d never really used before. Now that I understand it, I can see myself using it all the time — particularly when I’m collaborating on quilt designs with other people.

I was also surprised by how much useful information EQ8 displays right there on the interface. Once you know what you’re looking at, you can glance over and see things like the finished quilt size instead of clicking through a pile of options looking for it.

Then we got to fabric…

I don’t normally use a lot of actual fabric swatches when I’m designing quilts in EQ.

That may be about to change.

EQ8 comes with a fabric library containing more than 6,000 fabric swatches, and I learned that DoYouEQ.com also has free Fabric of the Month packs that you can add to your library. There’s also a Stash add-on available if you want even more.

But the really interesting part for me was learning how to upload my own fabric swatches.

I’ve never done it before.

Being able to mock up quilts using fabrics I actually own or want to use opens up a whole new set of possibilities for the way I design.

Then I discovered you can rotate the fabric inside the patch.

Again…

YOU CAN DO THAT?! 🤯

As someone who spends a lot of time thinking about directional prints, feature fabrics and how a print sits inside a block, this is incredibly useful.

And then we reached the moment that nearly caused me to fall off my chair.

THERE IS A FUSSY CUT TOOL!

I had no idea you could fussy cut fabric inside EQ.

None.

All the cool kids love to fussy cut, so this discovery is extremely relevant to my interests. 😂

Being able to position the motif inside a patch means I can get a much more accurate idea of how a fussy-cut quilt is going to look before I start cutting into the fabric.

Combined with uploading my own fabric swatches and being able to rotate them, this could completely change the way I colour and mock up quilts in EQ.

Block design was the section I was really waiting for

Designing blocks is the core reason I use EQ8.

Because I’m self-taught, this was the part of the class I was most interested in. I wanted to understand whether there were things I’d figured out by trial and error without ever actually understanding why they worked.

There were.

One of the things I’ve struggled with most is setting up snaps when drawing blocks.

Until now my highly technical process has basically been:

Change number. Look at block. Change number again. Squint. Change it again. Eventually decide it looks right.

Very sophisticated. 😂

The class explained the maths behind setting the snaps — including using the block size and multiplying it by four — which means I now understand what I’m actually doing instead of guessing until EQ behaves itself.

That was a huge lightbulb moment for me.

The class also reinforced how to find blocks within the enormous Block Library, and I liked seeing that you can view blocks in full colour, greyscale or as a line drawing.

The line drawings are especially useful if, like me, you enjoy stripping a block back to its geometry and playing with colour and secondary patterns rather than being influenced by the colours already assigned to it.

Even the sections I thought weren’t for me taught me something

I’m not a big appliqué quilter.

So when we got to the appliqué portion of the class I wasn’t exactly bouncing in my chair with anticipation.

But I’m glad I did it.

It made me look at the tools differently and think about other ways I could potentially use them.

Do not, however, hold your breath waiting for my exciting new career as an appliqué designer. 🤣

There were also some really useful finishing and printing tips.

Jenny demonstrates a clever way to mimic binding using a mitered border, and later I learned how easy it is to insert another border into an existing design. Those two things work beautifully together when you want the digital quilt to look more like the finished quilt.

For Foundation Paper Piecing, I learned that I can click and drag the templates around the page to arrange them more economically.

And I discovered the tape measure tool, which gives you a simple way to check dimensions and make sure the templates you’re using in a pattern are printing at the size you expect.

Not glamorous.

Extremely useful.

One of the best parts was being able to learn at my own pace

I watched much of the class at 2x speed.

That worked really well for me because I already understood the basics. I could move quickly through information I knew, slow down when Jenny showed something unfamiliar, pause the class to try something, or go back if I wanted to see it again.

That’s one of the things I really liked about doing this as an EQ At Home class.

I know my personality.

I would have found it much harder to sit in a standard classroom and move at exactly the same speed as everyone else.

With this format I could make the training fit the way I learn.

If I were completely new to EQ8 I’d obviously work through it much more slowly. But as an existing, self-taught user, being able to control the pace meant I could concentrate on filling the gaps in my knowledge.

So, is a beginner class useful if you already use EQ8?

For me, absolutely.

If you’re brand new to EQ8, there’s a lot here to help you understand how the program is organised and how the different tools work together.

But what surprised me was how valuable it was as someone who already uses the program.

Being self-taught means you tend to learn the route that gets you from Point A to Point B.

You don’t necessarily discover that there’s a much faster road running parallel to it.

This class showed me a lot of those faster roads.

Some discoveries were small workflow improvements.

Others — particularly the modifier-key shortcuts, working with uploaded fabrics and the fussy-cut tool — will genuinely change how I use EQ8 when I’m designing quilts.

Apparently you can teach an old Gnome new tricks.

Who knew? 🤣