Let's talk rulers and mats!
Whether you like Olfa cutting mats vs Creative Grid Mats, Bloc loc rulers vs Omnigrid rulers, how you use your rulers and mats is what's important. I tell customers and students all time that if it works for you...do that!
But what if you don’t know where to start? or what if what you are doing just isn't working?
If you know me at all, you know I’m stubborn. For a long time, I believed my way of cutting worked just fine… even though my pieces weren’t fitting together as well as I would have liked. My 1/4in seams looked right, but points didn’t always match and some pieces were just a bit short.
When I first switched from scissors to a rotary cutter and ruler, I relied on the lines printed on the cutting mat. I unfolded my fabric, cut one layer at a time, and lined everything up using the mat as my guide. It worked - eventually - but it was slow.
Then I took a class and saw someone cut folded fabric into strips first, then sub-cut the strips. WOW, suddenly I was flying through my cut lists, and I continued to do that for a long time because… well, it worked, right??
At a retreat, I mentioned my struggle with accuracy. Another quilter suggested the issue might be the fact that I was cutting with the mat lines - specifically that I wasn’t being consistent about which side of the line I was cutting on. I brushed it off. Surely that tiny difference couldn’t matter… right?
Turns out, it mattered a lot.
After enough frustration, I finally started watching how others cut—and noticed many were using the lines on the ruler, not the mat. So I flipped my mat over (to remove temptation) and committed to using my ruler lines instead.
That one change led to better alignment, straighter strips, cleaner sub-cuts, and more consistent pieces. Are my cuts perfect every time? No. But consistency is what leads to accuracy—and accuracy leads to better quilts.
Sometimes the biggest improvements don’t come from new tools, but from learning to use what you already have in a better way.
Helping you make memories, one stitch at a time.
