What quilting/sewing notion are you most Thankful to have been invented?
 

https://cdn.quiltingboard.com/images/smilies/smile.png There are so many gadgets to help make our quilting life simpler. What's your favorite?

For me, I like the rotating cutting mat. It simplifies squaring up blocks.

Depends on how old you are! I was 23 when I learned to quilt, and I'm 72 now. For me, the rotary cutter and mat were godsends! Tracing around cardboard templates cut from cereal boxes and cutting with scissors made the whole process tedious. It took 14 years for me to finish my first quilt!

Rotary Cutter
Knee Lift, Auto Thread Cutter & Start / Stop button on my machine
The Longarm
Wonderclips

Rotary cutter and mats are the top of my list for sure!

I would have to go with thread cutter on machine, rotary cutter, a good selection of rulers available for us.

My Sizzix cutter. It saves so much time and makes the cuts to much more accurate.

The one I'm most grateful was invented is the sewing machine - I'm always amazed to think of some of the clothing that royalty wore at a time that all sewing was done by hand. For more "modern" times, it's the rotary cutter and cutting mat. Without that I might not even make quilts.

On an interesting note, the story is that the first person that came up with a sewing machine did not patent the idea because family convinced him it was a bad idea as it would put so many people doing hand sewing out of work.

The assumption was that consumers would not change their clothing buying habits, but when clothing became much less labor intensive and more affordable, people started buying more clothing ( a lot more clothing!) . So the sewing machine actually created jobs instead of taking them away.

I agree. Without the rotary cutter and mat, I would not be a quilter. At my first quilting class, we drew lines on the wrong side of fabric (with ball point pens), then cut the pieces with scissors. No more templates for squares, rectangles or half and quarter triangles.

Not a gadget, but my quilting is also very dependent on the mindset and books from Eleanor Burns (can I really make a “Quilt in a Day”?) and Mary Ellen Hopkins (Are you sure “Its Okay if you sit on my quilt?”).

Rotary cutter and mat!
But also I love all the features my new machine has. I still love my FW and others but I love those new ones.