Hello EQ7 Blog Hoppers!! Welcome.

Welcome to my blog! This is my offering to SewCalGal's blog hop. I hope to teach you a new way to use EQ7!
So many quilts, so little time. How often we feel this way. I can't tell you how much time I spend on EQ7 just creating away knowing I won't have the time to make even half of these quilts. Well one day I was fooling around with a photograph of my cat. Quilts and cats can be in the same subject! So I took this picture. I know..... he is so photogenic.

Stay with me now.. this might get a little complicated. But if I can do it. You can! I opened it in Picasa and "boosted" the color. If you double click on your picture it takes you to an area where you can do fun things with your pictures. OK, so I "boosted" the color, saved it and exported it to a file on my computer. Btw I save it at 150 dpi. I then open it in Photoshop. There are really cool "filters" you can apply to your photos. I went through a few and found "cut out". I applied it to this picture and this is what it did.

Pretty cool huh. So I thought if I could do this to photos, what about quilt designs from EQ7.
Check this out! Here is one quilt design I did.

Now after I altered it in Photoshop using the  "fresco" filter effect.

What do you think? Looks like a piece of art now.  Pretty cool I say. You can totally do this with other photo altering software. But I find I like Photoshop the best. Don't have Photoshop? You can actually access it online.(in the cloud) It is a bit costly unless you are a student. It is around $75.00 for one month. But if you get all your work ready, you can do quite a bit in a month. Check it out here... Adobe Creative Cloud. There even seems to be a 30 day free trial. I haven't checked it out so if there are any catches, I don't know. But check it out.
You can just alter it in Picasa. Check out this one. Go from this....

To this...I used the Posterize effect.

So even if you don't have Photoshop, you can still make your designs look like cool artwork. Of course if you are a Photoshop guru you could figure out how to do everything in Photoshop. But I like the "boost" feature in Picasa and then transfer over to Photoshop for the rest.

Anyway, what am I doing with all these cool pieces of art? I am printing note cards and selling them on Etsy.
You can check them all out at curiousorangecat.etsy.com. However.... just for this wonderful blog hop I am offering a giveaway to one lucky person of a set of 4 of my new note cards. Just go to my  Curious Orange Cat Etsy site and then come back here and comment on any product I sell there. Tell me which one you love, hate, wish you had..  ( you don't have to buy anything. I just want you to look). I'll do the drawing and announce the winner here on my blog on October 5. Now get back to designing those quilts! Don't forget to come back here on October 5 to see if you won!

And visit Sewcalgal for the rest of the participants in the Blog Hop. Just click on the link here SewCalGal to see who's blog is next! Thank you so much for visiting!