O.K., so we're cheating this issue. Dean Neumann is not a quilter. He is, however, a computing quilter's best friend. He's the man who invented and programmed the extremely popular quilt design program "The Electric Quilt," also affectionately known as EQ.

Dean has been a hard man to catch up with. We tried to interview him a few months ago, but he was in the throes of completing programming of version 4.0 of EQ. Being a perfectionist, he couldn't give the time and care to the interview that he wanted, so we postponed it. Now that EQ is happily on the street and selling well, Dean has graciously provided us the answers to our questions.

Over the years, The Electric Quilt program has grown in more ways than one. The program itself has matured from a primitive DOS-coded "toy" into a powerful Windows 95 tool. As a business it has grown as well, so that now it involves Dean's entire family (along with several employees) in some or all aspects of producing, advertising, and distributing their growing line of products.

Dean's wife, well-known art quilter and TV personality Penny McMorris, is not only the main "front-lady" for the company, but she was also the inspiration for the creation of the program. Dean talks about the role she and others in their family played in the program's beginnings:

"After hanging out with Penny for a few years I'd seen a lot of quilts, and I had really started to love them. As a mathematician I had always been interested in geometry and so quilt design appealed to me quite naturally. Also, I had met most of the best quilt artists and so I had seen a lot of the best work out there.

"At some point my son, Tim, gave me a hand-me-down computer. I was really sucked into programming because it was so much like doing mathematics, except more fun. It just occurred to me one day to write a quilt design program. Two years later, in 1991, it was finished.

"Why a quilt program? It's difficult to design a quilt, since you can't really visualize it until you go through the long difficult process of making it. I thought that a design program was going to release the artist that's in every quilter because it would make it possible for them to see the quilt on-screen. Some people can see a design in their mind‚s eye before they cut the fabric, but for everyone else a quilt program ought to be a terrific tool."

Today's EQ IS a terrific tool, but it didn't become that overnight. "EQ1 was a very simple program," Dean says. "It just dealt with straight lines, and it didn't even support a mouse. But we were happy to find that a lot of quilters liked it, even back then. . . . Some of our first users are still with us, and when we see them at trade shows we laugh about how they used the arrow keys to draw quilt blocks in EQ1.

"We started the business in our house. I remember how surprised we were when calls began coming in while I was still finishing EQ1. (We had demonstrated a beta version briefly, without naming it, on an episode of Penny's TV show, The Great American Quilt.) Penny's oldest daughter, Erin, was home then, and said she planned to move to San Francisco when we had 100 people on our mailing list, and that seemed a lot to us."

Designing and programming a major drawing program of any kind is an arduous undertaking, and it was made more difficult for Dean by evolving standards in the computer world. In the early '90s Windows was emerging as a major platform and the rate of change in the industry was accelerating.

"When I started version 2.0, I felt Windows still didn't have the performance needed for a quilt design program, so I decided to stick with DOS," Dean says. The new version was a quantum leap over the first one, and included mouse support and a growing number of sophisticated features, including block libraries and new drawing tools.

"I finished EQ2 in 1994. Then I did BlockBase, a computer version of Barbara Brackman's Encyclopedia of Pieced Quilt Patterns. I had admired Barbara Brackman ever since finding the early self-published copies of Brackman's encyclopedia (now available from AQS). I have always loved the idea of collections, in this case having all the pieced blocks in the entire world (no longer true, of course), so this project was really great fun." BlockBase was an extremely popular program which is now out of print. A new Windows-based version is in the works for later this year.

With BlockBase finished, it was time to look at EQ again, and to again face the quandary of Windows vs. DOS. Dean says: "After BlockBase, we had accumulated a number of requests for additional features in EQ3. And we decided it was more important to add features than it was to switch to Windows. That may have been a mistake. But at the time it seemed to be the right thing to do, since we weren't having problems (those came later, with the newer Windows-only printers), and we had a loyal group of users eagerly wanting to do more with the program. They were asking for features such as curves in EasyDraw, applique, numbering foundation patterns, overlaying applique and quilting. So we stuck with DOS . . . ."

Mistake or not, the intervening years had brought new competitors into the field of quilt design software and it was clear that Windows was the platform of choice. So with EQ4, released this past spring, The Electric Quilt at long last made the transition. Deans says it liberated him: "Now that I'm programming Windows, I really love it. Windows does so much for programmers. In EQ3 I had to make every button myself. In EQ4, all I had to do was tell Windows to make a button, and it draws it. This gives you time to concentrate on the things that are really quilt-related such as improving the algorithm that lets us figure out the numbering system for paper pieceable blocks, and the algorithm that converts lines and arcs into patches in EasyDraw. The Windows development tools are terrific."

While the Windows-based community was happy with the continuing stream of new products, Macintosh users felt somewhat left out. Dean and the company made some attempts to create a Mac version of EQ early on, but these efforts met with disappointment and were finally abandoned. Dean says "Our reason for not having a Mac version is fairly simple: we think Mac users really want a Mac version written specifically for the Mac, not a converted PC program. We are really trying to concentrate our efforts on what we do best -- and that is writing and supporting PC programs. Just keeping up with one operating system, the needs and wants of our users, and the growing list of projects we want to do, is more than full time for everyone on our staff. We think we'd be spreading ourselves too thin to try to support both operating systems."

The latest programs developed by the company are Sew Precise! and Sew Precise! with Shirley Liby, stand-alone Windows products that create foundation paper piecing patterns for use by quilters. Dean says "Since we had produced BlockBase years before, many people had asked us to do something similar with paper pieceable blocks. It's been really popular, probably because it's so easy to use."

With a stable of successful products on the market, Dean and company are not resting on their laurels but are hard at work on new goodies for computing quilters. A fabric disk to go with EQ is in the works, as well as the new version of BlockBase. The company has always had a very open relationship with its users through a variety of media and has sought user input actively. Asked what feature has been most asked-for by users, Dean says "Before EQ4, the most requested feature was importing scanned fabrics. Now that EQ4 allows users to import pictures for fabrics and tracing, things seem to be quiet for the moment. We're going to be implementing a 'wish list' survey page on our web site ( http://www.electricquilt.com ) to help us keep track of users' wishes. One thing is certain, our users are always a step ahead of us in what they'd like the program to do." EQ users also provide ideas and seek help through Planet Patchwork's popular Info-EQ mail list, which now has 2,200 members ( http:// planetpatchwork.com/info-eq.htm ).

The company's web efforts have also matured over the last several years. EQ's first website was pretty much home-made and had a friendly feel. EQ the Mouse was your host, offering up product information and a special EQ-oriented mystery quilt. Recently the company obtained its own domain and has hired professionals to modernize and upgrade the site. EQ the Mouse is less visible, but still around, and the site offers a number of useful forums and features for EQ users.

As a pioneer in the computer quilting world, Dean has a unique vantage point from which to contemplate how far we've come: "It's been a long, slow road to actually integrate computers and quilting, " he says. "Only the really technically forward-looking quilters have even wanted to consider using a computer to design with. Recently, though, it seems to have been gaining considerable momentum. Obviously the Internet is a huge factor because quilters are naturally interested in sharing. That's characteristic of quilters in general. So I think the Internet will play a big role in popularizing computers for quilters."

Whatever the future of computers in quilting may be, we can be sure that Dean Neumann and The Electric Quilt Company will also continue to be a huge factor.

TVQ

Planet Patchwork