Ask EQ! - April 2008
Technical questions answered this month by EQ the Mouse
Q:
Just who are you Mr. Mouse?
A: Thank you for asking. I am the official EQ Mascot. I have
held this position since a winter night in 1993 when Penny noticed
me running across her desk and hired me on the spot. At that time
the EQ headquarters was housed in the basement of the Neumann/McMorris
residence. I had come in from the woods for a bit of warmth and
to see if Penny had left lunch crumbs behind. She took me by surprise,
we both screamed, then she invited me to join the technical support
department of Sara, Andrea and Penny.
So my job is to collect questions from you and to answer them,
at times with their help. Do you have a question? If so, send it
to the Tech Support
email address. Subject: Ask EQ. I'll answer your question,
and you may see it in one of my columns.
April 2008 note from EQ the Mouse: Thank
you for the welcoming notes and questions which poured in. It's
good to be back with you all. And I do remember many of you from
the past, and am so glad to know you're still with us. You all
seem just the same as you always did. But I feel a bit older and
am hopefully wiser. But enough about me... on to the questions.
Q: How can I change the fabrics that appear in the palette
each time I open EQ6, making my own special palette always appear?
A: Here's how:
• Open EQ6 without opening a project (click Cancel at the opening screen).
• Open the Sketchbook and delete any fabrics you do not want. (Click Clear
to clear them all out.)
• Go to the Fabric Library and get whatever fabrics you do want.
• Once your Sketchbook fabrics palette has only the fabrics you want as
your “default palette,” close the Sketchbook > click FILE > Save Palette as Default.
Now you'll see these fabrics in your palette each time you open
EQ6, unless you open a project that contains different fabrics.
Q: What do I do about an error 42 when installing
EQ6 on Vista?
A: This error 42 is Vista's way of asking you for more permission.
Here's what to do:
Hold down SHIFT and right-click the red and white EQ6
icon on your computer desktop.
Choose Run as administrator.
Choose to Allow this.
Now continue with the activation.
Q: Where in the heck do my saved quilt files
go? My computer repairman restored them, but I can't find them.
A: Those computer repairmen! Do you have EQ5 or EQ6?
In EQ5, projects get saved here:
C drive > My Documents > My EQ5 > PJ5
In EQ6, projects get saved here:
My Documents > My EQ6 > PJ6
[Documents > My EQ6 > PJ6 for Vista Users]
Notice the difference? To find EQ5 projects you must first click
on C drive, then find the particular My Documents folder that is
on C drive.
For EQ6, you go directly to the other My Documents folder—the
one usually found most easily, right under Desktop, or on the side
in My Computer.
But since your computer people put the files back in, they could
be anywhere. To find them, click Start > Search > Files and
Folders > type: *.PJ5 (or *.PJ6) > click Search. The command:
*.pj6 tells your computer to find "all files that end in
.pj6"
Once you find them, move EQ6 projects or EQ5 projects to where
they should be, as described above.
Q: How can I make the EQ6 border tab let
me use more than 24 blocks in my border?
A: Show EQ6 you are the boss. You can add more blocks to your
border by doing this:
Click QUILT > Options > Layout Options > All Styles.
Change the "Number of blocks horizontally and vertically" from
24 to any number you would like, up to 100.
That changes the number of possible blocks across and down your
quilt layout as well as across and down your border strips. So
you can now have as many as 100 blocks across your borders, or
your quilts.
Q: How can I make a tablerunner with the
center three blocks 6" square and the blocks at either end
7" wide
x 6" high?
A: I had to leap onto Penny's keyboard late one night after she'd
gone for the day to actually work this one out. Here's what to
do:
1 Click QUILT > New Quilt > Horizontal.
2 Click the Layout tab > make 3 blocks horizontal by 1 block
vertical > size 6.00 for both > sash size 0.00.
3 Click the Borders tab > click to check L & R, and T & B > make
the Top and Bottom sizes 0.00 > make the Left and Right sizes
7.00. Make sure the border style is Long Horizontal. These border sides will now look like blocks on both ends
of your tablerunner.
Now you can add your next border if you want a border around that.
You can check the "All" box on the Borders tab if you
want all the border sides to be equal on your second border.
Q: Can I delete EQ5 once I have installed
the EQ6 Upgrade?
A: If you have the EQ6 Upgrade installed, you may uninstall EQ5
from your computer if you need the room, although the program is
about 1/7 the size of EQ6 and does not take up much hard drive
space. (Your EQ5 projects and User Library files, if you have saved
either, will still remain on your hard drive and can be used in
EQ6).
But you must keep your EQ5 CD, and the EQ5 serial number. Your
EQ6 Upgrade CD is useless without the EQ5 CD, as it will not install
unless EQ5 is already installed on the computer. Should you lose
the EQ5 CD, purchasing a new one will be prohibitively expensive,
and we want to make sure you never need to purchase an EQ5 CD since
you already own one.
Q: How do I delete a file from My Library?
A: To delete a library
style you have added and no longer want:
Open My Computer > My Documents > My EQ6 > User.
You'll
see your My Library files there and can delete from there by clicking
a file, then right-clicking and choosing Delete.
Q: I scanned fabric and imported it, but it looks so odd.
Little sections keep repeating. What's up?
A: First, decide how you want to use the fabric:
- As a *panel*, which will fit, as is, into a square or rectangular space? If so, import it as a photo (see page 138 in the EQ6 User Manual). You will then see one image — exactly what you imported.
Disadvantages:
- Photos, and fabric imported as a photo, can easily take up hundreds of MB, and this can slow down your whole computer. If you had a whole quilt full of these types of panel-imported fabrics some computers could not handle files that large.
- You can only set this image into a square or other rectangular space — just as if it were a photo.
- OR as a cut up *piece of fabric*, which will be used in small pieces of the whole, to color any space (not restricted to squares and other rectangles)? If so, then import it as a fabric. Then you will then see the one image that you import repeated over and over (tiled) as many times as needed to fill the space you're trying to fill. (This is what you're seeing now).
Advantages:
- This tiling is done to make the file as small as possible, to keep your project files small.
- You can color patches with your fabric image.
Here are some tips for scanning fabrics:
- Pay great attention to where you are cropping. Try not to cut across a design if possible (sometimes of course it can't be helped).
- Capture the smallest repeat possible — for example, for a one-color polka-dot fabric, you would only need to capture one polka-dot. That polka-dot and background color would repeat, forming a whole which would not show the tiling.
- If you have a large-scale fabric, and can't capture the whole image in one crop, then capture many different crops of the fabric and import them all. You can use the different parts of the fabric in different parts of your quilt just as you would when actually cutting the fabric up. Don't forget you can use the Fussy Cut tool to move the fabric image on the patch if you want to.
- Consider how you are going to be using your final quilt image.
If you're a professional, needing to use the image of your quilt
in
a book, magazine, or other printed material, pay particular attention
to the cropping. An exact look should be possible: Many of the
quilt fabric manufacturers now actually use EQ6 to create the virtual
quilts they use in ads and other promotional materials, and love
the way the program displays and scales their fabrics. But if you're
really just trying to get an impression of what the fabric colors
will look like, having an exact look may not be so important. All
of the fabric in EQ6 is real, scanned fabric and works quite well
for getting an impression of the final quilt for quilt planning.
Q: Why does my imported fabric print look so small in my quilt?
A: The
fabric image scales real size (as long as you did not rescale it
before you imported) — this means if you view the fabric on
a 10" block, on the block worktable, the designs on the fabric
image will look exactly the same size that they would on the
actual sewn block (although they will tile if necessary to fill
the block patches).
And if you view that same fabric on a 80" x 80" quilt,
the fabric will appear exactly as it would as if you were viewing
that 80" x 80" quilt from whatever distance away from
the quilt you would need to be to see the quilt in the size (maybe
about 8") that you see it on the computer monitor. The quilt
fabric will look as it does if you put it way across the room and
walk far away from it — the print will look very small.
If you zoom in on the quilt the images on the fabric will appear
larger and larger as you zoom, just as they would as you walked closer
and closer to the quilt.
Do you have a question? Send it to Ask
the Mouse.
