Originally Posted by jeaninmaine
Did you use a ruler? Wouldn't a pinking blade have to cut with it's inside edge against the ruler so the piece would end up larger than if you cut with a straight blade? Or are you somehow measuring the seam allowance from the inside edge of the cut?
Yes, I used a ruler to cut my fabric. The pinking blade is a zig-zag, so part of the rotary (the "zig" part) butts up against the ruler when cutting, and part of it (the "zag" part) is a few millimetres away from the side of the ruler. The "zig" part hits the ruler in the same place that a conventional rotary cutter abutts the ruler.
When I was sewing the 1/4" seams, I used the outermost part of the cut fabric to align my seam to. There are parts of the fabric that are, indeed, a bit smaller than the edge, and that part is closest to the machine needle. The outermost part of the fabric edge is still closest to the right hand side of the machine, in the same manner as a conventionally cut, straight-line fabric would be. I aligned my 1/4" seam using the outermost edge. By doing so, my 6" blocks turned out to be perfectly 6.5" before I sewed all the blocks together.
I use Triangulations to made half-square triangles - see a demo of this at
http://www.connectingthreads.com/tut...ideo__D30.html - and when I cut them apart I used pinking shears just to see if it would be any different than using my pinking blade on the rotary cutter - it's not.
This is why I'm now sold on cutting everything using a pinking blade.