On the occasions when I do need to use my own fabric in an EQ drawing, it’s so easy with EQ7. The best way to do it is to scan each fabric individually and import those. My scanner is not my friend! If I used it more, I’d get a different one. I suppose the worst problem with it is . . please don’t laugh . . it’s part of my printer. I print too much stuff and leave it in the printer. We all share the same networked laser printer. We each have our own inkjet . . don’t ask me why . . but everyone uses the laser. When Vince or Chad come to get something they’ve printed, they take all my stuff and put it on top of the printer . . which means before I can scan anything, I have to move mountains of paper. So, I never use my scanner!
Now you know I’m a lazy slob so I’ll share with you the lazy way I get my fabrics into EQ.
I lay them all out and take a picture of the whole group.
Then I crop out a square of each fabric and save it separately. I end up with these .jpg files in my picture folder.
Then following the directions in the EQ7 book, pages 208-209, I import the fabric files into my sketchbook and can plug them into my design. Using the camera vs. the scanner, I do get some tiling in my sketch but that doesn’t affect the sketch enough for me to take the time to scan each fabric individually.
One bit of advice is to take your photo using the best light to produce an accurate image of your fabric. In this picture, I had these fabrics laying in a darker spot in my sewing room where there was a halogen light.
The next photo is the same fabrics but moved to an area of the sewing room with better lighting.
The second photo is much more true to the fabric. If we want an accurate sketch of how the quilt will look with a specific fabric, we have to be very careful to get the color as close to true as possible.
Almost all the time I can find a fabric in the EQ fabric library that works with my design without importing my own fabric. There are many, many fabric palettes that can be downloaded from EQ here and added to your fabric library.










