Why You Shouldn't Let Me Use a Quilting Rotary Blade

I got married nearly two years ago, and it was a complete DIY wedding. It was beautiful, and fun and really inexpensive because we did everything ourselves. I scored my Alfred Sung dress for $300 because it was a discontinued style. I had the reception at a restaurant instead of a hall, so I saved thousands. I actually made money off the ceremony because the minister was going senile and kept missing appointments and showed up 45 minutes late for the rehearsal and gave us $60 in total for the inconvenience. My mom is a floral designer, so she did my flowers as a gift to me. It was an amazing wedding done for way under $10 000.


Part of DIY weddings is doing it yourself. My mom came up with the awesome idea of making a "cake" out of three hatboxes and using it to hold cards. We bought this beautiful taupe/gold fabric on clearance from Wal-Mart, and some brown satin ribbon and used some leftover silk flowers from my bouquet. The idea was to cut the bottoms out of the top two tiers, cut a slit in the top, glue the tiers together, cover it in fabric and use the ribbon to hide the join. How could you possibly screw that up? Well, bear in mind that it's me.


Everything was going according to plan (I had actually made a plan this time). The bottoms were cut out and I was ready to cut the fabric to size. I thought that if I used a rotary blade for quilting that it would be quicker and look a lot better than cutting the fabric by hand. What I failed to factor in was how sharp rotary blades are. I did alright with the first couple of panels, and then the old carelessness kicked in. Whoop, rotary blade right across the thumb. And not just the thumb, but the thumbnail. Imagine, if you will, the amount of pressure one must apply in order to cut a fingernail open. It hurt like the dickens and bled like crazy. Thankfully I am no stranger to craft-induced injury, so I wrapped some toilet paper around it and went on with my crafting. I finished the card cake and it looked beautiful, but my finger didn't heal in time for the wedding. Thank goodness for nail polish. (It was also too cold outside for the spray glue that I used to adhere the fabric to the boxes. So I did it inside. Without opening the window. And I got glue all over the floor because I didn't lay any paper down, but whatever.)


I bet Martha would know to keep her fingers out of the way when using a rotary blade.