Much of my smaller work involves cutting squares, rectangles and strips of fabric, some of which is attached to stabiliser and some of which is not. I also produce my own tags, business cards and custom-fold and trim my brochures. Doing those things by hand, with a rotary cutter and straight edge is not difficult, just time-consuming and ultimately hard on the wrists.

The other day I picked up this little gem:

It’s a Fiskars paper trimmer. It takes the same rotary blades as my larger rotary cutter and works for fabric as well as for paper, card-stock, stabiliser and other flat things. I use it primarily for squaring off my rectangular pieces and cutting the backings. It’s saving me buckets of time and is by far easier on my hands and wrists as I no longer have to put pressure on a ruler or worry about the straight edge slipping. It also works in such a way that my hands are well clear of the blade and there’s no chance of my “missing” the edge of the ruler and slicing my fingers (haven’t done this yet, but have come darned close).

In short, it’s marvelous. The surface area is 13.5″ long (in the direction that the cutter travels) and 12″ wide, which means that I can rough-cut a super-long strip of stabilised 5.5″ fabric and slice it easily into 9″ lengths, the rough-cut sides of which can then be trimmed and tidied without spending endless hours lining things up with the ruler.

The only modification that would be nice is a lock of some sort that could be attached when not in use to keep little fingers away.

If only the Fiskars circle-cutters for paper worked on cottons reinforced with stabiliser. Anyone tried these?