At last, I've learned to sew curves! Now I can make New York Beauty blocks. Not only can I sew them, but I can also draw those curves and blocks in Electric Quilt 6! I sewed these three. I'll be making a set of 25 with flowers, mostly roses.
Sewing these curves was one thing. I needed to learn how to put the curves together to construct a block for my guild's opportunity quilt. The designers of the quilt know that I love paper-piecing, but they didn't know I had never sewn curves. The three NYB blocks are this page were my practice blocks. I think I did a great job, even for a beginner at curved piecing.
For the opportunity quilt block, I was expected to leave the paper on, but I don't think I'll do that again. Leaving on the paper does not give the opportunity to ease and utilize the bias curves.
Drawing those curves and blocks into Electric Quilt was something else! I used Andrea Bishop's EQ6 arc tutorial to clone and rotate sections of the NYB block. That didn't work for me in every case, so I also used the EQ6 User's Manual to draw, partition, and stagger nodes on arcs.
I received additional inspiration from two books: Radiant New York Beauties by Valorie Wells and Karen K. Stone Quilts.
The blocks I'm working on now are from a collection of New York Beauty patterns by Christina Carl. She used to have an active website called Quilter's Corner Club. The patterns were offered free as a block of the month series in 2007. As of this writing, no one seems to know how to contact Christina Carl, an enthusiastic and talented designer. She certainly inspired me.
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