Inklingo New York Beauty in Electric Quilt

I had a good time designing a few New York Beauty quilts in Electric Quilt—and you can have my project file as a starting point for your own Inklingo designs.

Sizes in Electric Quilt

The first thing to remember is that quilt blocks in EQ do not have a size associated with them. The size can be anything!

The size is not established until you set the blocks in a quilt layout. For Sunflower and New York Beauty, the blocks must be either 6 or 12 inches. (Inklingo always uses the finished size. Easy!)

Notice that the 6 inch NYB block is a quarter circle, so when you place 4 of them together, the result is the same size as the Sunflower 12 inch and twice as big as the Sunflower 6 inch.

 

This quilt was fun to design. The colors were inspired by . . .

 

. . .  a quilt designed by Barb Vlack on the cover of her book Quilt Design: Border, Layout, and Setting Secrets, published in 2003.

 A Nifty EQ Tip

I learned this little trick from Barb Vlack.

When you click on a solid color in the Paint dialog box, you can right click and choose “add grades” to make new swatches. It is easy-peasy.

For example, when you right click on a solid red, like I did (above) . . .

. . . the result (above) will grade from red to yellow in 10 steps.

Is that cool, or what?

You can even click to change the starting or ending color to get exactly what you want.

I clicked on the yellow box (above) and chose a blue instead . . .

. . . and got this new palette.

When you click “Add to Sketchbook” the colors are ready to use!

Wow.

Let me say that again. Wow.

Barb’s Quilt Design Book is full of great stuff like this. It was written for EQ5, and my example is in EQ5, but this method works EQ6 and EQ7 too.

I have thrown away many old computer books, but books from Electric Quilt are keepers—worth hanging onto, even 9 years later.

 

Printing on Dark Fabric

If your NYB design includes dramatic darks and blacks, be sure to check our tips for printing on dark fabric in the blog archives.

 

The Electric Quilt Project Files – Free! 

You can download my EQ file and have some fun designing with the new NYB shapes.

The files are all identical.

3 Cool Tips

Many of us only use a small number of the tools available in Electric Quilt, but I hope our little tip today will make you want to explore EQ even more.

  • Make it a habit to right click occasionally, just to see what extra options EQ gives you.
  • Be sure to set the block size in the quilt layout to 6 inches for the NYB quarter circle, okay?
  • If you ever have a chance to take any class from Barb Vlack—go for it!

You CAN Sew It!

Whether you design with EQ or a paper and pencil, you know you can actually sew it and get great results when you use your ordinary Inkjet printer and Inklingo to print the shapes on fabric!

Combo 2 – Cut the freezer paper 7.25 x 8.75 and print a Custom Page Size. (The fabric can be slightly smaller.)

Maybe you will use this combo layout to print several fabrics with diamonds, half diamonds, large triangles, and small triangles, and mix and match them in several New York Beauty blocks.

I hope you have subscribed to the blog so you won’t miss anything good, because there’s more coming.

  The clock is clicking on the special NYB sale price, okay?

Thank you for visiting.

Linda & Monkey

New to Inklingo? Order and download free shapes and start sewing in the next few minutes. Quick Start (Always FREE.) There are triangles, diamonds, and squares in the free collection—great for dozens of different blocks.

Inklingo for Beginners

Inklingo Quiz – Just for Fun!

4 thoughts on “Inklingo New York Beauty in Electric Quilt”

  1. I haven’t played with the Serendipity tool yet, Barb.
    I will now!
    After using EQ7, it is hard to go back to EQ5. It was wonderful at the time—TEN years ago—but the new versions are awesome.
    I hope all the slow-pokes who are still using EQ5 appreciate my sacrifice. LOL

    Reply
  2. Thank you, Linda, for the great endorsement! You are right about the EQ5 and EQ6 supplemental books still being valid to use with EQ7. That’s because they are DESIGN books, not just how-to-use-the-program manuals. From EQ5 to EQ7 there will be some translation of tools and where they are located, but the design principles and tips carry forward to EQ7. You proved that with my “Clams and Geese” quilt on the cover of my book for EQ5. I’m flattered that it inspired your beautiful NYB quilt with the color gradation.

    More EQ7 advice for using the NYB EQ project file —
    From the Block worktable, you can go to BLOCK > Serendipity > Shrink & Flip Block and create a single block with four NYB blocks. You can even rotate the orientation of the blocks for variations before you Add to Sketchbook. (Sorry, this feature is not available in EQ5 or EQ6.)

    Thank you, Linda, for YOUR inspiration with Inklingo!

    Barb

    Reply
  3. Pingback: LeeHaven
  4. Thank you so much Linda for the great advice on the EQ books. I have a couple from EQ5 and didn’t realize they were still good for EQ7 (which I finally got last year for my Birthday ;))
    The NYB looks very tempting 😉
    hugs
    Elly

    Reply

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