Design Wall Monday: Pineapple Paper Piecing and EQ7 Magic

First Paper Pieced Pineapple Block Completed, 17 3/4"

Happy Monday!  I continued to work on my first pineapple block in odd moments over the weekend, and finished up the first of 36 blocks this morning.  I love how it came out!  The paper piecing was super easy and fun, and what took the longest was selecting and cutting the fabric for each strip.  You can read more about that process here in case you missed that post. 

Now, for the magic: After finishing this first block, I wanted to get a sneak peak of what the finished quilt might look like.  This quilt will be fake scrappy, as most of my quilts are (meaning that I mimic the look of a thrifty, dig-through-the-scrap-bin quilt by purchasing lots of NEW fabric and cutting it up into little pieces for my projects), but I'll be using the same coral red fabric for the centers and corners of my blocks, and similar combinations of neutrals, greens, and blues.  So I photographed my block from above, cropped out the seam allowances, and used my nifty new EQ7 quilt design software to resize the block photo and duplicate it into a quilt design.  This is what my finished quilt will look like:



Sneaky Peaky: My FUTURE Finished Pineapple Log Cabin Quilt, 104" x 104"

How cool is that?  This is almost exactly what I had envisioned for this project, so I can proceed as planned.  But if I didn't like the sneak peak, I would be able to make changes to my fabric choices after just one "practice" block, rather than having to make four or more blocks in real life and then realizing I didn't like the overall effect after hanging them on the design wall. 

So I'd say the quilting software was a really good purchase.  I've only watched a couple of the tutorial videos and played around with it a bit through trial-and-error so far, so I've only scratched the surface of its capabilities, but I can tell already that I'll probably be using EQ7 in some capacity for all of my future projects. 

I'm linking up with Design Wall Monday over at Patchwork Times, as well as the NewFO linky party at Cat Patches.  I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone else has been working on as well.  Happy stitching!