You are here: Home > Support > Frequently Asked Questions > Electric Quilt 5 > Solids-Colors-Prints-Fabrics

Electric Quilt 5 Frequently Asked Questions

 

I scanned my own fabrics. Why does the print look so large on my screen? I am only getting half the fabric pattern.
Directions for scanning fabrics can be found in your lime-green Design Cookbook on pages 158-159. Many people skip "Option Step 4". If you do this step it will change the scale of your fabrics.

• (In MS Paint) If you think the fabric pattern looks too large on the screen, go to the IMAGE menu, and choose Stretch/Skew. Type 50% for both the horizontal and vertical stretch. This will make the fabric scan appear smaller.

---

When I "Add Colors" to the Colors palette, it always adds a white swatch and sometimes skips some of the colors I add.
For this portion of EQ5, we are calling on a Microsoft color palette. Apparently there is a glitch in the code from Microsoft. The steps in bold below help you get around the Microsoft glitch. Here are the complete directions:

1. Click the Paintbrush to make the Fabrics palette appear.
2. Inside the Fabrics palette, click on the Solids tab.
3. Right-click *on top* of the solid swatches and choose Add Colors.
4. Click on the blue title bar of the window that appears and drag the box to the middle of your screen.
5. At the bottom of this window above OK and Cancel, click on "Define Custom Colors".
6. You will see a box with: Basic colors, Custom colors, a color matrix with a crosshair over it, a luminosity slider and 6 boxes in the bottom-right for inputting your own color numbers manually.
7. Under Custom Colors you will see two rows of blank white boxes. You need to work from left to right and top to bottom.
8. Click the top-left box in Custom colors to select it.
9. If you know the HSL or RGB number of the color you want, enter it now and skip to step 12. Otherwise, continue through the following steps.
10. In the color matrix, move the crosshair to the color/hue you want. Slide the luminosity slider up or down to make the color more or less intense.
11. Repeat step 10 until the Color|Solid box shows the color you wish to add.
12. Click the Add to Custom Colors button. The selected color will appear in the top-left box you selected in step 8.
13. If you want to add another color, start from step 8. This time select the box to the right of the one you just filled.
14. Once you add 8 colors to the top row of Custom colors, start in the bottom-left and repeat for another 8 boxes.
15. Click OK when you've created the colors you want in Custom colors.
16. You will be returned to the Solids palette. The swatches will be at the very end of the current swatches.

If you want to add more than 16 swatches, you need to click OK once you have created the first 16 and then start over from Step 1.

You may still get one white swatch at the very end of the colors you added. If it bothers you, you can delete it via the Sketchbook. Click View Sketchbook - Colors tab. Scroll all the way to the end. Click on the white swatch and click the Delete button. Click the X to get out of the sketchbook. (Usually we do not advise deleting colors.)