My boyfriend was walking through a ditch trying to catch crawdads and he stepped on what we think is a piece of glass. It cut a pretty long gash on his fat toe. About 1 1/2 inch long. Hr doesn't think He needs to go to the hospital but would like to care for it himself. We went home and he washed it with warm water, put alcohol and cleansed it with that dark stuff they use in hospitals. He then put a large bandage around and and over that wrapped a gauze. He took some pain killers and I gave him Penicillin. It wasn't till that night that It really began to hurt him, so much it kept him awake most of the night. We think he might need stitches but he feel that it might heal shut if he keeps it bandaged. How can we care for his cut without the aid of the hospital?

I'm making a quilt for my niece's graduation. The pattern alternates large 7 1/2 inch batik squares with four-square patches of black and white. So far, so good. All the batiks are cut, and all of the four-patch squares are sewn with standard 1/4 inch seams.

The pattern called for 3 1/2 squares to make up the four-patches. So now I have all of these four-patches that are 1/2 in larger in both dimensions than the batik squares ... and the only way I can figure how to fix this so that they're the same size as the batiks is to carefully cut off 1/4 inch off each side of the four-patches. We're talking 50 of them. How best to do this? Time is of the essence; I don't have a lot of spare sewing time to begin with, and this is now putting me further behind -- with quilting and binding yet to be done! (Needless to say, I'll be machine quilting in-the-ditch if I ever get to that point!)