Practice Makes Perfect?

I have spent a lot of time this week playing with Sew Kind of Wonderful's  Quick Curve Ruler.  I am a novice at curved piecing, and probably wouldn't attempt it at all if it required a lot of pinning.  With this ruler, there isn't any pinning required  to sew the curve portions of the block.  That's a plus!  There is a lot of squaring up, though, an with that comes some fabric waste.  To me, the waste is ok.  I have a lot of fabric, and wasting a little doesn't matter that much to me.  I'll use a lot of the 'waste' in scrap quilts.

The directions for some of the Sew Kind of Wonderful have complicated cutting instructions.  If you don't do a good job at cutting out the pieces, the block can be way off and unusable. There are good video tutorials for a lot of the patterns.  I don't think I would be able to figure out how to make these quilts without the tutorials.  Even with the tutorials, I made many, many cutting errors.  My advice is if you don't like to cut, don't try these patterns.

I first tried to make some Chic Kisses practice blocks. I cut the gray piece on the left incorrectly by cutting on the wrong fold.  Fortunately, I only made this error once and was quickly able to determine what happened.

I made the following arc incorrectly many times for many different reasons, including not having a scant enough 1/4" seam, and a printing error that left a template 1/16" off.  That 1/16" mattered enough that it took me a long time to figure out the problem.  I checked the 1" test line, but the 1" test line was only off by about 1/5 of 1/16, and I couldn't tell when I checked it.  Lesson learned the hard way!

The next block seemed promising at first.  But my copy of the Chic Kisses pattern was in a magazine, and the squaring up instructions were incomplete.  I should have followed along with this part of the video tutorial instead of just trimming it the way the instructions indicated.  If I had, the squares in the corner of the blocks would be actual squares with 90 degree angles.  That's an important part of this pattern, so this block is a fail. 

So I tried again and came up with this:

The corners of this block are better.  My issue with this block is the orange center. 

You can clearly see that the top orange piece is narrower than the bottom piece.  I think that the problem is with the way I sewed the curves.  I haven't done enough to get consistent results.  Inconsistent curves was the problem I had back in 2017 when I first tried this ruler.  I know I need more practice!