When I first saw folks talk about the Accuquilt line of products online a few months ago, I was curious. How could you speed up your fabric cutting? How much easier could it be? When I was sent a Go! Baby machine to review, I decided to put it to the test against my trusty Olfa rotary cutter.
The Go! Baby claims it’s 90 percent faster than traditional rotary cutting. For this test, I decided to cut 30 23″ strips to make one crib-size quilt top. I cut the same amount of strips for each technique.
For the educators out there, the Go! Baby is just like an Ellison machine. The dies cut when pressure is pressed upon them, but unlike an Ellison, the Go! Baby cuts when the die is rolled across the machine. You apply a little a bit of pressure to get it going and then the turning of the hand crank moves it across the machine. It’s easy to use.
Before I share the experiment results, here’s how the machine works.
These are the dies I was sent – a basic strip and squares.
When you use the dies, you place a hard plastic cover on die as it goes under the pressure point.
Fabric on the die before the plastic over.
The Results
It took me 29 minutes to rotary cut all my pieces for the first quilt. It took me about 35 minutes to use the Go! Baby machine to cut the second set of fabric. All in all, not that significant of a difference. With the basic geometric shapes, I’d say stick to rotary cutting. However, I can the Go! machines being a big time saver for unique shapes, such as hearts and stars, for applique projects.
One thing that confused me was to why some of the dies kept the pieces still connected to the fabric once it had been cut. There’s an explanation in the die directions, but I still didn’t understand. This added more time to my cutting after I ran the fabric through the machine.
Consensus?
If you’re not a fan of rotary cutting or you do a lot of applique projects, give this machine a try. However, if you think rotary cutting is ok, just stick to the basics.
And it wouldn’t be a big post from me if my cat didn’t want to get involved…
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