I thought that I would play with the EQ8 Serendipity tool today and show you what I discovered…come learn along with me!  To begin, I opened the “New Block” tab and sketched what I thought would be one quadrant of a block design, because I intend to start with the “Shrink & Flip Block” tool.  The purpose of that tool is to take one design and shrink it to one quadrant of a block, and flip the other quadrants in order to create a new block.

After designing the block and coloring it using the “Fabric Tools” tab, I clicked on “Block” followed by “Add to Sketchbook.”

Next, I clicked on “Block” followed by “Serendipity” and then I selected “Shrink & Flip” and located my design from the block sketchbook.

My new block design automatically appeared!  Selecting the “Add to Sketchbook” button adds the new design as a complete block to my sketchbook.

Clicking on the image buttons below the block, cause the quadrants to be reconfigured in multiple ways to form new blocks.  This one has potential too!

To play with that first new block design a bit, I clicked on “New Quilt” tab and adjusted my layout under the “Layout” tab, got rid of the borders under the “Borders” tab, and then I selected the new block and held down the Ctrl button while clicking once on the quilt top layout.  That filled the layout with my new block.

I chose “Fabric Tools” to play with the colors a little bit more now that I can see the block in a layout.

I used the “Swap Color” button to quickly change all like colors on my layout to new colors.  Then I used the “Paintbrush” to go in and click on each piece that I wanted to recolor green.

Next, I decided to try highlighting some of those interesting background fabric shapes, or negative space shapes, forming a secondary pattern.

Then I used my one of my favorite improvements found in EQ8, the “Hide/Show Quilt Patch Lines” function found right above the question mark on the far left column.

I love how this feature shows you the design without the visually jarring black patch lines.  Don’t get me wrong, those lines are really helpful when considering quilt top construction, but I love seeing the quilt top design without them.

The “Shrink & Flip” tool is a lot of fun for block design!  I could accomplish the same end results without using that tool. I could have instead filled my quilt top design with the quadrant I had originally designed and then rotated the blocks into this configuration. However, this tool saves time and perhaps shows the user some block configurations that you wouldn’t have considered on your own.

My EQ8 coupon code expires at the end of this month!  If you are interested in EQ8, visit the Electric Quilt website and enter my code “EQ8AMY” at checkout for 20% off.