 Hi you guys, Lindsay here. Welcome back to my channel, Inside to Him. So you guys know my love, hate, torturous relationship that I've had with rotary cutters. I don't know what it was for all those years that I bought all those rotary cutters and was never able to get any of them to work. I don't know. It obviously is me. It's not like I could purchase that many and they were all defective. Like that literally makes no sense. But for whatever reason, I was not supposed to use rotary cutters for that time in my life. And all I can say is that now I am making up for lost time because I have three rotary cutters that I absolutely adore all for different reasons. So I thought I would do a video today to explain to you some of the differences in rotary cutters are definitely not all created equal. And so I wanted to let you know some of the different options and features that are out there. So that if you love rotary cutting as much as I do, if that's how you prefer to cut out your pattern pieces, then you could find a rotary cutter that makes the most sense for whatever projects that it is that you are working on. So all of these are made by Kai. Kai makes incredible cutting tools. All of their scissors that I own are just insane and amazing. And every time I use them after using crappy scissors for many, many years, I can truly tell you that all of their products are worth the investment, whatever the investment happens to be. Okay, so the very first one I'm going to talk to you about is this little purple and like teal green one. This is the RX-45. And you may be wondering what in the world is that little contraption hanging out the side of it? Well, this rotary cutter is a 45 inch blade, 45 not inch, that would be humongous, 45 millimeter blade. It has the typical feature where you push in and up and it pushes out the blade and then you push it back down and it goes back into like safety mode. So it's a little way, a little precaution for you to not hurt yourself with it. Truth be told, I always forget to do that and you guys are always yelling at me because I'm like waving it around and I don't have the cover on or whatever. You guys get real mad at me. I'm sorry. But anyways, so in its original form, it is pretty standard. I will say the grip of it is really, really nice. It's got like a rubberized grip, which is really comfortable on my hand. But this is what makes it so cool. It's a very, very simple concept that someone who has been using rotary blades for a really long time thought, you know what? It would be so easy for us just to add this little doodad thing here and it would make it easier for those of us who are quilting, I think. I think this is mostly best for quilters. So you can see the cutter has this little hole in it. This little thing fits into the hole like so. And then there's little notches in the black thing for different quarter measurements. And then on this end is a little ball. And basically whenever you draw your line for your bias strips or you draw your line for your like quilt strips, whether it's on grain or whatever, you put the little ball on the line and then you use your rotary cutter. So you only have to measure one line. And then if you hold this in place at whatever width you want your bias tape to be or strips to be, then it will keep the measurement for you and you don't have to keep measuring every single inch or whatever it is. Isn't that so smart? Like I said, it's not that like ingenious of an idea. It's just somebody was just using their brain one day and said, this is all it would take to eliminate all of that measuring. So I really thought that that was cool and neat. And I've tried it out on my own bias strips, not on this top, but on my last Willow tank top, the yellow and blue one, I made my own bias strips for the neckline and the arm side and use this to cut them all out, which was really, really great. So that's option one, Kai RX45. The next two are similar but different. So you can see they look the same in terms of like color and style and stuff. And I talked about the 5045 in my favorites video. I'm going to reshare all my thoughts with you about it now in addition to its little mini counterpart. So some things that make these two super cool are a it has this protective cover. So if you have children or cats, percocious pets that can easily get their hands on this and possibly do some damage, you might like this because it actually has a cap. It doesn't lock in place or anything. So you're like child protective lock, but it is one extra precaution that you have to take. In addition to that, I mean, it does it does lock in a little bit. I don't know how strong kids or cats are, but you can hear it does lock in place. The other thing is unlike your traditional rotary cutter where you have to push in and up to release the blade, on these you don't have that. That features, there's nothing there. It only engages the blade whenever you press down on it. But you see the black rim, that's the safety on it. And when you push down that black slides back and then you can use your rotary cutter like so. So another little extra, I don't know, sort of sort of precaution because you can't ever leave it like this. You can never do that. That's not an option. It'll always have the safety on if you're not touching it. So that's really cool. The other thing that's really nice is on the back, there is a soft, too hard, like switchy little scale thing. And that is intended to work harder, not smart, I mean work smarter, not harder. The rotary cutter will work for you. So if you have a lightweight fabric, like silk or shally or something like that, you can move it to the soft setting and that will just make the rotary blade not engage so much. And then if you move it all the way to hard, like if you were using denim or upholstery fabrics or something like that, then the rotary blade is going to work really hard for you and you don't have to press down as much. The rotary cutter is going to do a lot of that for you. There's also a middle ground there, which I use for like mid-weight fabrics, like cottons and things of that nature. So you can switch between them if you'd like and just have the rotary do a little bit more of the work for you so that you're not really having to press down all that much. The tension in the blade mechanism is going to be doing a lot of the work for you. In comparison, you can see about the grips, so you can tell this one's a lot more ergonomic with the rubber handle. This one, not so much, I mean it's just like a plastic thing, but I haven't noticed totally, like I do like that it's rounded on the end that fits into the cup of my hand really well, but you know, I haven't noticed it being too much of a problem, but it's definitely not as comfortable as the other one. So I'll tell you about these two if you can only get one and you can't get both of them. It's tough. I really, really love this Mac Daddy one because it is weightier, like it just feels more substantial and it's just like slicing, it's like a warm knife through butter honestly, but this little guy is so great for all those little like arm size and collars. You know how pattern pieces can have those little itty-bitty curves in there and this just doesn't navigate those curves as well as this one. So if you're sewing children's clothes, doll clothes, if you're sewing a lot of garments that have those kinds of concave and convex curves, maybe invest in this one and see how you like it, but I'm telling you for like like hems and waistbands and side seams, you're just like zipping through them with this. There's just like nothing like it. Get both if you can, but if you can only get one, you got to pick one based on the kind of projects you're working on most often unfortunately. And then if you're doing a bunch of quilting or something where you need a lot of strips of things, I highly recommend this one. This little tool is so fun and so just smart. I love when people do smart things that make my life easier, right? Like thank you. Thank you for thinking. Thank you for thinking like I would even though I had never considered my brain doesn't work in an inventors kind of way like that. So I appreciate that, but so Kai has other rotary blades, rotary cutters as well that I've just never ever tried. So let me know if you have any of those other ones and what you think of those. I'll also tell you they sell their own blades so you don't ever have to worry about getting like knockoff blades that are cheap that aren't going to last. I have been using these non-stop since I got them maybe three months ago and they're all holding up and you guys know how much I sew. So keep that in mind. So but I love that they sell their own blades so that you're not getting like a really good cutter and then it not really working for you because the blades are cheap. You know what I'm saying? So I will have links in the description box for these three rotary cutters as well as their entire library of rotary cutters. There's also a coupon code for you guys to use as well. So be sure to check the description box for all of that information and go get you some rotary cutters and let me know how you like them. That's gonna do it for me today. I will see you all very soon. Bye!