Many of my friends and colleagues have been asking whether it is best to use traditional dressing fabric scissors or the new rotary blades currently sold under the popular Olfa brand. Well, my answer to this question is pretty simple. Use what works for you in terms of cutting fabric and making dresses or tailoring. Both scissors and blades have their advantages and disadvantages. It’s all about how you are going to use them.
For example, if you only cut dresses, tops, skirts, and other loose fitting womenswear, where precision is not so important, traditional fabric scissors do a great job. They are versatile and can be used even without a table. Or you can at time trims thing or prototype mock ups while the garment is still worn on a model. Scissors are also convenient to carry around the work room or sewing machines for small tasks that need clipping, like trimming excess threads, chopping the corners of cotton fabric, unpicking faulty stitches and etc…
Fabric scissors’ other great advantage lies in precise cutting and slicing control over curve shapes or contours. While blades can be very good at getting the straight lines perfectly lined up, they can’t compete with shear dressing scissors when you need to create curly artistic cuts on expensive fabric like leather skin. Blades also surrender to heavy duty scissors when it comes to cutting a bulk of fabric, any where thicker than a quarter of an inch (e.g. you cut several suits for the same customer, but they come in four different colors and types of wool fabric).
Olfa rotary blades, on the flip side, are very efficient fabric cutters. An experience cutter will tell you that they can be as twice as fast as using ordinary shear scissors. This is due to handling differentiation. With scissors you have to hold its circular handle and pick the fabric up between two cutting blades to do the cut. With rotary system, you simply lay the fabric flat on the table (with a cutting mat underneath), and this alone save on huge amount of time.
The second benefit comes when you can actually avoid the chalking step which is almost a must when using scissors. When you cut with a rotary cutter, all you need to have perfectly neat cut edges is a solid piece of garment pattern (which can be bought cheaply at fabric shops) with heavy weight put on top of it to prevent skewing. Then simply grab the rotary cutter and run it around pattern edges, without chalking or marking anything (well, you still need to mark things like drill holes, plackets, button position, etc…).
So depending on situations, either scissors or rotary blades will become your best friends. Many home sewers prefer traditional method with shears and scissors because they got used to it, but for those who do cutting on regular basis (if you run contract cutting service) a rotary blade along with properly equipped cutting table using safety cutting mat will prove to be the best investment you have ever made in your carrier as apparel clothing cutter.