Connecting arcs...

Okay, now we're really rolling on the Dahlia, and this part goes surprisingly fast, even if it is the scariest. Last time we finished putting the individual arcs together. The next step is to put them together in pairs. This is where the real curved piecing happens, and of course, the challenge of lining up seams that aren't nice and straight, like most matching of points. You will start with your B arc on top, despite it being the convex piece of the curve in this situation. The main reason you do this is because of how the Dahlia goes together overall.


It's important one again to make sure that your marks are lined-up. By this point, I don't need to use the pin anymore, I can just eyeball it. But do what works for you. You can see my B, the light piece, is on top. In the book, it says to start at the dot, but on this piece, there's no reason I can fathom to do so, so I started at the edge and lowered my stitch length to 1.8 or 1.6 to make it a little more secure.


It's important to remember that unlike square or rectangle piecing, you can't just line these seams up by snugging them together. The seams make a sort of X as one piece is angled one way, and the other, the opposit, nonetheless, we want them to match. The best way to do this is by feel, I think. You want the cross of the X to be right at the quarter inch. In the picture above, you can barely see the yellow tidbit, but you can see that the two seams will cross right at 1/4 inch. I will say that sometimes you really have to manhandle your fabric to get it to work. I don't know if my way of piecing this curve is the "right" way, or what the quilt police would say, but it works pretty well for me, so I'll pass it on, but I encourage you to do what works for you.
You can see above that I am stretching the hell out of my fabric. Those are very curved pieces but I stretch both top and bottom until they're practically straight. I don't stretch the inner part as much because the curve is subtle, and easy to accommodate with less drastic means, but out toward the edge, the curves are deep and can be unwieldy using some more traditional method, such as pinning. The book also says to pin at every seam intersection, but I like my "find the crux of the X" method better.
The only seam that doesn't really cross in an X is the very last one. You can snug that one just like you'd snug the seams of a four patch to get sharp points. Like below:
Do not connect all your arcs together. Just connect them into pairs with one B arc, and one C arc.

If you stitched right through your X crosses, your seams should be nice and lined up.
The next step is to connect your arc pairs to the center of the dahlia that we made earlier. You will only sew one side of the arc's bottom to the left side of the opening in the center piece.
Here I've already attached the arc on the right, but you can see that the left-hand side I left open. I also only sewed dot to dot when attaching that short segment. Then moving counter-clockwise, I attach a second arc, as I show above. Now, according to the instructions, you should have all your arcs flapping around the center before you connect them to one another, and that is the ideal, but for purposes of blogging, I went ahead and attached the two pairs that I sewed on.
You start at the dot on the back of an A piece, but other than that, it's just like connecting the arcs into pairs, except you have the center flopping around.
This is the only stretch that's different from connecting your arcs. Sew from the stitch line on the A piece (the orange wavy business in this picture) and then continue on like you did above.
Continue counterclockwise around the whole center, and voila! You'll have a Dahlia. I'll do my best to get mine done this weekend and start with the process of putting it on the background, but I have two card tournaments this weekend (yeah, I'm a geek and I play a game called Magic, increasingly in tournaments, but originally just with my fiance). At least I'm not gambling. Anyway, I'll do my best to keep the Dahlia rolling.
Happy Quilting!