photo of Christine Baker and Nellie Homes from Upper Canada Quiltworks

Everyone Travels a Different Path

Lauren MacDonald
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Winter 2019

What makes Electric Quilt 8® (EQ8) the right path for you to follow to design quilts? Some quilters begin working with the program in order to design their visualized quilts in a program which can print out yardage, templates and foundation patterns. Some quilters have more simple tasks – resizing and changing blocks or printing quilt labels and text for appliqué. It is interesting to hear stories from EQ8® designers!

Christine Baker and Nellie Homes are the quilters behind Upper Canada Quiltworks . Their path to EQ8® was born of necessity! Both were accomplished quilt designers with their own companies. After creating a new company together, Christine and Nellie used Microsoft Publisher® to write patterns. Fast forward to designing quilts for Northcott® .

Since Northcott sends designers digital fabric files, Christine and Nellie had to begin using our favourite software! Starting with EQ5®, they were able to use the program easily once they worked through all the lessons and exercises. Now, they both  recommend EQ8® because it is easy to use. They teach beginner classes in their studio.


New Beginnings
 block-of-the-month quilt designed with EQ8.

Christine and Nellie use EQ8® from beginning to end in the design process. Unless designing an appliqué pattern, they hardly draw anything on paper anymore. It takes time to learn EQ8®, but the ability to change block placement, fabric choices, numbers, sizes and types of borders so easily makes learning time worth it.

For pieced quilts EQ8® really is the best! They love the business of designing and selling patterns, but admit it is a lot of work! They sell patterns through multiple channels: directly to shops, through wholesalers, through distributors, online via their website and as  pattern downloads on Bluprint®. Most of these arrangements were made by having a booth at International Quilt Market. Christine and Nellie also design patterns for magazines and recently licensed a design with Connecting Threads.

photo of Tweets and Twinkles quilt.
Tweets and Twinkles, designed with EQ8.

NOTE: Northcott allows access to all of their fabric collections in order to download them to the Fabric Library in EQ8®. Check out an article about this process.

Quilt Canada July 19-22, 2023

Quilt Canada July 19-22, 2023

Quilt Canada July 19-22, 2023 in Edmonton, Alberta