Today I’m sharing a digital rendering of Rotation in Heavy Metal by Island Batik!
Heavy Metal from @island_batik, designed by Kathy Engle for Swan Amity Sheridan of @swanamity is an exciting new line hitting store shelves this month and you can win one of two fat quarter bundles for your very own! The hop and giveaway is happening over on Instagram, but I’m full of words tonight, so you get some of those, too.
Here is the quilt.
Looks different, right? This is what happens when I play in Electric Quilter (EQ8) sometimes. I tried the “flip” button, and reversed some of the blocks. I really like how different it looks from the original layout. Here is the original.
I love playing in EQ8. It isn’t as good as fabric, but it isn’t bad. Plus, I’m helping another designer get the word out about their fabric, and it has taken me about 15 minutes. The hardest part was downloading the fabric images, which isn’t all that hard.
I start by setting up a folder on my desktop. Then, I go to the manufacturer website, and find the images of the fabric line. I click on each fabric image, and select “save image as”. I then tell it a name, and tell it to save to the new folder.
Then, in EQ8 I go to the fabric library and import all of the images, then send them to my sketchbook. Then I can plop them into the quilt. Easy peasy. Sometimes the scale is off, but it is good enough to get an idea. There are ways to make sure the scale is correct, but EQ8 isn’t my final product, and I just don’t care enough. It’s a digital sketch, and also gives me a yardage estimate.
I think I might actually go ahead and work this up in some fabric at some point, I like the secondary shapes created by the flipped blocks. What do you think? Maybe I need to do it just like this, to make a real Rotation in Heavy Metal.
Head over to Instagram and see how the other participants have used the fabric. And make sure you visit Swan to get a shot at winning a bundle!
Want the pattern – find it on my Etsy shop!
I just finished the binding on my “Fireside” Rotation quilt (I love it!). I saw the first photo in the post and couldn’t figure out why it looked so different until you mentioned you had flipped some of the blocks! So cool! I love this pattern!
Thanks, Wendy! I’m so glad you enjoyed the pattern. The more I play with it, the more fun I have.
I really like how the design changes with simply flipping every other block. It’s fun to be able to mock that up so quickly. Rotation looks great in Heavy Metal either way!