What if I told you that designing a quilt has become easier than ever?

What if I told you you could design your own quilts and not do a lick of math in the process?

EQ8 is a super easy way to digitally design a quilt, and because it’s all digital and computers are really good at math, it spits out all the cutting instructions and yardage requirements for you!

Even the most technologically challenged people will find it easy to manipulate and design with. 

So today I’m going to show you just how easy designing your own quilt tops has become using EQ8 software. 

And it all starts with this opening screen. 

The first step is to select the Quilt Worktable.

Choose your layout

Theres a few things you’ll have to choose before you start getting into the nitty gritty of your design. 

You’ll have to choose the setting of your blocks. 

Do you want them straight, or on point? Are you using a single block all over like a hexagon? Or do you want something more improv-ey?

Once you’ve decided how your main quilt will sit, you’ll be at the point where you need to decide on the final size of your quilt in blocks. 

3 blocks by 4? 12×14? It’s up to you. 

The rulers on the top and left side will tell you the final dimensions of your quilt as is so you can get an idea if you are in the throw quilt neighborhood, or the king size. 

Like the amount of blocks, but want to scale the quilt up from a throw to a king? The next step is to determine the finished size of your blocks. 

You can go from a crib size at a 9 inch square block to a throw size just by changing the final block size to a 12 inch square block instead. 

The quilt itself would stay proportionately the same otherwise.

You can even choose the dimensions of the block sizes separately so you can make rectangles if you preferred. 

The last piece is to determine if you want sashing around around each block, or not.

You can also customize this to have different size sashing going in different directions. 

Or include an outside border to the sash or not.

If you are already sold, check EQ8 out on Amazon here.

Add some borders

Once you’ve figured out the section where all of your blocks will be, you can move on to adding borders. 

I typically like to add at least one border that I use as my binding. 

Then add any others I intend to use with the design. 

Want a pieced border? There are options for that. 

You can choose a border made of blocks, or you can choose just a straight plain border. 

The drop down lets you select one of the apparently million options of ways to create a quilt border.

Until using this program I honestly had no idea there were so many options for borders on a quilt.

Set Blocks

Time to add the blocks to the quilt!

The program has a library of I don’t even know how many blocks already set to be used in a quilt that will automatically resize to fit your pre-chosen block dimensions. 

This library contains pretty much every block I’ve ever heard of, and many I have never heard of.

But if for some reason it doesn’t have what you are looking for, a block worktable exists in the program where you can very quickly and easily draw your own custom blocks.

Design your quilt as you like, and then we move on to my favorite part.

Already in love with the features? Check it out on Amazon here.

Choose your fabrics and colors

You can play with color placement over and over and over until you know its your favorite color combinations and layouts. 

The program itself has a ton of preloaded fabrics and solids that you can choose for to just get an idea.

But if you are looking at specific fabrics, you can go on to online fabric websites and actually upload the fabrics you have, or are intending to use for the project. 

Do you like using precuts of premade collections? Load the whole collection in and decide ahead of time if it’s what you’re going for. 

Not the right collection for this design? Upload another one until you find the perfect fabric collection for your design!

The program has many shortcuts when it comes to this step to help you edit your blocks quickly all at the same time, or even every other at the same time.

Print it out!

Once you are happy with everything head on over to Print and export.

On the left-hand side it gives you all the options you could need to develop a full reproducible pattern for your design.

Want to just see the finished quilt printed out? Select Quilt, maybe just a single block? Select Block.

Want the full yardage amounts to make your quilt? Select yardage.

Using trickier blocks that need templates? Select templates.

How about foundation paper piece parts? Select foundation.

Just want the cutting instruction? Select Rotary!

You can print out instructions or details for any one of these options and get all the instructions you need to make your quilt.

You don’t have to do any math whatsoever to get what you need to make your quilt! It literally does it all for you.

Inspired yet?

Designing a quilt has never been so easy. It’s now literally as simple as playing a game on your tablet. 

So if its ever been something you thought would be fun, but thought it was too complicated to try, I’m here to convince you otherwise.

No one in the world has the same ideas and creativity as you do, and each quilt has it’s own story.

Using EQ8 has made designing a quilt super simple. So head over to Amazon and check out EQ8 for yourself and start designing your own quilts!

Still not convinced? Check out my full review of EQ8 here for all the nitty gritty on the program.