Starting the arcs

Fri, May 23rd - 4:07PM

Piecing the Dahlia Arcs...
The next step in the Giant dahlia is to piece the arcs. You'll piece two sets of arcs, one that starts with B, and one that starts with C. Today I'm doing the B arcs, but the technique is exactly the same. The only thing I had to pay attention is to what color of each piece I was using, as my C and my E pieces are alternating colors. I laid them out below so I made sure to sew all of one color on the B arcs, and all of the other color on the C arcs.

To begin piecing the arcs, I took a B piece and the C pieces and laid them how they would and then flipped them right sides together. I put a pin through the marking on each to line up the first corner.

Then I squeeze the fabric together, carefully remove the pin and slide it under my sewing machine needle and lower the needle to hold it in place. Unlike some of the other pieces we've sewn, we'll sew edge to edge here, not dot to dot, as there won't be any Y-seams, or anything like that.

Here I have the needle down in the fabric and I'm going to sew a scant quarter inch seam. When I sew curves, I generally like to have the convex side on the bottom, and the concave side on top, however, for such small, barely curved pieces as B and C, it doesn't matter. I'm actually stretching both pieces in the picture above, and sort of pushing the edges into alignment. This works especially well for subtle curves. We'll get into deep curves later in the process.

Here you can see that I pressed toward the smaller piece, as I will do for this whole arc (the other arc we'll press the opposite way), but you can also see the difference between lining up those dots...and being too lazy to line them up. It's subtle, and fixable later on, but if you're a stickler for accuracy (I'm not, I'd rather fudge something later than do it right the first time :), make sure you line those dots up.

Here I'm piecing D and E the same way I pieced B to C, except now I have D on the bottom (the convex) and E on top (concave) the way I like to. In order to keep them lined up all the way to the tip, if you look carefully in the picture above, I have my forefinger on the bottom piece and my others on the top, that keeps the bottom piece from sliding around as that curve feeds through your machine, it also keeps the stretch even in both pieces which is critical for sewing a smooth curve.

Here is the finished DE unit which I will join to the CB unit the same way I did before. I laid the result on the center below to give you and idea how things will eventually go together.

My other colored Es and Cs will be in the other arcs, but you can begin to see the Dahlia coming together. Next time we'll get into some deeper curves with the big outer pieces, and hopefully, time willing this weekend, some tips on piecing curves with seams on them.
Until next time:
Happy Quilting!