where art thou, rotary cutter?

Unfortunately most of my Saturday was spent looking for this little contraption called a rotary cutter. It's an essential tool for cutting fabric. But with the luck I've had in creating my quilt, I shouldn't have been surprised to discover my tools disappearing and another frustration added onto this project.

My sewing room (which used to be a living/dining room but now doubles for crafts and my 5- and 1-year-old nephews' toy storage room) isn't as cluttered as one might think. At least not to me. But I was paranoid that one of the boys would find my cutter before I did and have fun flipping up the sharp handheld circular blade. After hours of going through every stack of crap in the house, my mom finally found it in a drawer that was hidden by a tablecloth covering it. I'd forgotten that piece of furniture even had a drawer.

So then I got to cutting! The gray mat beneath the black fabric is the rotary mat, a padded plastic mat with a grid to help measuring, also ensuring that nothing such as a table gets damaged by the blade. The clear ruler also has a grid for measuring, and by placing it on top of fabric and running the rotary cutter alongside the edge, you get a straighter cut with less effort and in less time than you would cutting with regular scissors. My idea for a black satin border also didn't work. (Surprise, surprise.) Satin is just too slippery to keep a straight line, much less to sew. So I switched to black cotton that I thankfully already had in my stash.

After cutting 2.5" wide strips, I sewed them around my quilt top and ironed down the seams. Ta da! One border done. And I'm actually really starting to like the way it looks. Never underestimate how an outline can bring a design together. I think this is all I will have time for this week since so much time and stress was spent recovering my rotary cutter from the dungeons of dark and forgotten drawers, but at least now I know where it is, so when I have a moment to cut my outer green border it should be easy going.

Here's a close-up of the quilt's two fabrics since I know they're hard to see in the pictures. All in all, a succesful weekend of sewing.