Horror Movies and Patch

02/03/2009 by Kevin.

I earlier stated

“As an ‘outsider’ to the patch world – I am totally amazed about how the perception of patchwork is so different to the reality.  The public perception of patchworking is a woman sitting in a rocking chair, cutting up old shirts and sheets with scissors and sewing them together to eventually make a quilt.”   

In continuing this viewpoint I would like to talk about the cutting up of material. The vision of using scissors is very outdated.  Today’s patchworkers use rotary cutters (a glorified pizza cutter!) to cut up material and do so on a calibrated cutting pad - as a precision paper cutter would use.  On top of this to help make the right cut an acrylic template is used.  This help to get the precision in the sections used for patch. However don’t think it is just a single acrylic template.  Any patchworker will have a large library of these acrylic templates.  In fact the collection of these templates seems to be a standard obsession among patchworkers.

So scissors are not used? Hmm - not sure where scissors are used, but there certainly is no shortage of scissors in my house.  In something that looks more like a scene from some horror movie - scissors seem to be everywhere I look in the house.  Strangely, it seems, none of these scissors can be used for anything other than material (all 100+ of them) - so if I want to cut a piece of paper I apparently have to tear it by hand, rather than use these specialist instruments (that don’t seem to be used in any case!).

Will I ever understand this world?

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