Tool Time! (and a Giveaway)

Does everybody know what time it is? Tool Time!!!

Nope, this is not an episode from the show "Home Improvement"!!! 

Hey, all of you Lilypad quilters! Padsworth and I have found another cool tool for you to check out! Let me tell you about it. It's a wonderful thing to have a job to do, and to have the right tool to do the job. (Hey, I've been known to wield a chain saw with some dexterity on occasion. But I digress.)

How many of you are really dedicated to documenting your quilting projects? Show of hands, please?

Now, how many of you would *like* to be faithful about documenting your projects?  Aahh! More hands this time!

The cool tool that I have reviewed for you is (trumpet fanfare) Quilt Album!! You can check out their site right here.  (And if you just can't stand the suspense, you can scroll to the bottom of this post for our giveaway --- the whole software package, just for you, for free, to one lucky winner!)

You may be trying hard to keep a notebook or portfolio of your completed quilts and projects.

I've tried that, too. But I always want to make sure I have pictures, and maybe swatches of fabric, and notes about blocks I designed, etc. It ends up looking like that pile up there!

Well, here is a neat (pun intended) solution for all of us! Quilt Album is a software suite that allows us to use images on our computer, slide them into the right spots on a page, and make all of the notes that we want to! It has spots on the page that will jog our memories so that we write down all of the tidbits that we'll want to know when we look back at our progress (or that others might want to know about how we developed our projects).

Who made this?      For whom was it made?

Did the quilter use a pattern, or is it a one-of-a-kind design?

How long ago was it made?

?????

All of these questions will be answered by the Quilt Album pages that you can easily generate on your own computer - easy peasy!  See, on OleFrogEyes, you can have six quilts going at once . . . but what if you start number seven? You'd like to be able to document the one you are dropping off, right? Well, here you go!

It can be used for all kinds of projects, too! Here is the page I created (in no time flat!) for the Christmas stocking for PurplePandaQuilts:

Whoa! I see you starting off to hunt for your magnifying glass . . . hold on and I'll give you a "zoomed in" picture, OK? Here you go:

On the left-hand side of your screen is where you can add lots of information --- not just the name of the project, but when you began and finished it, fabrics used, and get this: you can customize your categories, so your projects are naturally organized the way you choose! Some of us make lots of totes and purses, some specialize in mugrugs, some of us do a little of everything! You can make ten categories that you choose yourself - none of this "here it is, take it or leave it" stuff here . . . the writers of Quilt Album have given us carte blanche! (I just thought I'd throw that in there, so you think I'm all sophisticated and everything!)

By the way, the reason that Quilt Album seems so tailored to us quilters is that it was dreamed up by two quilters, and their hubbies wrote the software! Sweet! OK, back to our screen shots.

Here is the right-hand side of the screen:

This is where you park your picture, and you can import it or drag and drop it in there. If you pulled it in on its side, you can rotate it so that it's just perfect.

See those two places that say "print"? One is for if you would like to print a real page and place it in a journal or scrapbook. The other is for what I think is the coolest part of this software suite!!  Just wait till you see this!

If you click where you see the words "Cards and More" you'll be transported to the land of Quilt-adise, where all seams are magically one quarter inch and pinwheel points always match, well, no, but this is really wonderful anyway! The page that opens will allow you to print your own cards, for any occasion, and in almost any size!

You can click on that graphic to "embiggen" it, and you'll see there are options to print a cover page (for that scrapbook we mentioned), greeting cards, quilt labels and more!

I am so happy with this software suite that I am planning on making quilty Christmas cards this year! There is so much more that I'd like to tell you . . . like how I can make a page for each block of that memory quilt with stitcheries, and how I can make an index for the album with all of the projects listed --- organized in their categories! You can even upload your Quilt Album to Facebook! Whew! So much fun!!

Alright now . . . I would really like to give one of you special peeps a free copy of Quilt Album --- and the lovely folks there said that I could!! Hoppy froggies!! Yay!! (Padsworth is clapping, too!)

Here are the ways that you can enter the giveaway:

       1. Leave a comment on this post, telling us which Quilt Album feature you'd like to try first.
       2. Leave us another comment if you follow here at Lilypadquilting.
       3. If you "do" Facebook, check out the Quilt Album Facebook page, and leave them some love there! Then come back and tell us that you did!
       4. Blog about this giveaway, and leave us a comment (and linkie) that you did. (Yes, I do check!)
      

We'll leave the giveaway open till November 10th, and announce our winner on the 11th!!
Hoppy froggies! Four chances to win . . . . and if you don't win, there's a button on the left-hand side of Lilypadquilting, that will get you a $5.00 discount on the already low price of $29.95 for a copy of the software! You can click through from our blog, and enter the discount code to get your reduced pricing.

I know you'll love it! We quilters give away so many of our projects --- wouldn't it be nice to keep track of them? You know it would!!

Love to all of you,

PS Another neat feature of Quilt Album is that each time you exit the program, it backs up your files --- saves them without your having to remember to do it! Gotta love this software!!

PPS For one more entry to win, you can leave a comment on the OleFrogEyes Facebook page and I'll add those to the entries!