Using an AccuQuilt

I recently got the chance to try out my friend, Debbie Wambaugh's AccuQuilt Studio Fabric Cutter before she packed up and moved away (sniff sniff, miss you already Debbie!).
  
I don't normally do a lot of traditional block quilting so I had to come up with a project out of my stash to take over and cut out.  I saw Mark Lipinski's great recent quilt design, Goose Chase in Quilty magazine,

You can buy a digital version of this pattern right here.

 I didn't have a lot of time, so I decided to cut out all the small triangles in lime green, orange instead of pink and black for the colors. And instead of a white background, I chose a variety of  white with black prints.My plan is to cut the bigger ones out myself (since there's a whole lot less of them!)

The AccuQuilt triangle die has the corners cut off of the triangles, which is great, it will make it so much easier to fit those triangles together. I always struggle with that, so any help is appreciated.

Gosh it was so easy to use, once you get the fabric positioned, it's just an easy turn of the handle. I can really see now why people are so excited about these gizmos.  I need to come up with some good reasons that I need one because it was super fun to play with, I can imagine a lot of possibilities.  They have a zillion dies in all kinds of shapes (including strips), so I think I'm going to save up for one.

Sometimes holding the rotary cutter for more than a few minutes gets very hard for me, as my right hand hasn't really recovered from my finger injury a few years back. It's a safety issue as well as an accuracy issue.

Besides the fiddling around with getting the fabric the right size and shape to go into the cutter, the only other big downside is that there is lot of fabric wastage using this cutter.  Which I'm sure with practice you can minimize a whole lot more than my first attempt. Of course, since I love using scraps this isn't really a problem.

So two thumbs up from a novice user with this new tool, putting it on the I-Want-List.