Remember when I broke the sewing machine needle and it ended up in my eye? I thought that was as dangerous as quilting gets – but found out today that I was very, very wrong. I’ll tell you all about it, but don’t look at the picture if blood and cut fingers bother you.

Rotary cut finger

Some quilt patterns require special shapes that a regular cutting ruler just won’t do. So I make by own out of a thick flexible plastic (think flexible cutting board). I was cutting quilt pieces with a homemade template – plastic, not cardboard – and a rotary cutter. The cutter blade (only an hour old too!) caught the edge of the plastic, jumped up onto the template, and tried to cut my finger off before I knew what happened. I managed to bleed on my clothes, the floor and the cutter before I got to the sink and stopped the bleeding – but I didn’t spill a drop on the fabric! The picture was taken about 9 hours after the incident – I’d taken a shower and had to change the bandages. Chad and I decided tonight that we probably should have gone to the hospital and had it stitched up because the cut is pretty deep (it went through my fingernail!) but at the time it happened neither one of us mentioned it. And it did quit bleeding fairly quickly, so it’s probably okay. But my finger will never look the same again.

Well, it’s throbbing like crazy (we just changed the bandage though too), so I’m going to go give it a break.