EQ8 Tip - Flip Flop Fabrics Quickly

Note: This post contains affiliate links. I may receive a small commission (at no extra cost to you) if you click a link and make a purchase. 

 Hello!  I'm back today to share a quick tip for quickly flip flopping fabrics in EQ8!

When I'm playing around with fabric options and fabric placement for a quilt, I often like to try reversing some fabric placements to see what they look like. For example, when I refreshed some of my quilts in Corey Yoder's Sugarcreek fabric, I originally used a white background and a dark fabric for the chains in my Wishing Well pattern as shown below.  

I decided to see what it looked like if that dark fabric was used for the background with the light fabric as the chains.

My first blog post about the basics of EQ8 mentioned how to change every instance of a particular fabric in a quilt top with one click using the Swap tool. You might assume that is how I do this. You would be right but it's a bit more complicated than that.  

If I started with the first version above and used the Swap tool to change the white background to that dark print in the chain, I would end up with this:

That actually looks really cute, but we'll assume we want to keep the chains. So now we have a bit of a problem. If I click on one of the chain patches with the Swap tool, it's going to change both the chains and the background. I could recolor the little squares that make up the chains one by one, but that would take forever!  

With just a couple extra clicks, I can get around this problem while still using the Swap tool!

Instead of starting out by using one of the existing fabrics, choose a fabric that is not used anywhere in the quilt. It can be anything since we won't be leaving it there. I picked a blue from Lella Boutique's Bloomington line that I had also imported into this project right before I had imported Sugarcreek. It was already visible on the screen so it was a convenient choice.  

Click once with the Swap tool and all of the background will change while leaving the chains separate.

Now we can change the dark fabric on the chains to white with just one click of the Swap tool.

One final click of the Swap tool will let us change the background to the dark fabric that had been on the chains. Now you have swapped those fabrics quickly and easily with just a few clicks!

I hope you found this tip useful!  If you want to grab your own copy of EQ8, you can find it at the Electric Quilt online store.

Until next time,

Amanda