I would like to step up my game a bit and am thinking that it might be time to get a cutting mat. We live in a small-by-the-rest-of-the-nation's-standards-outside-of-NYC apartment so up until now I've tended to save up my fabric and patterns to cut them out at my parents' house, but I wind up 1) biting off way more than I can chew in a size range before my daughter grows out of them and 2) rushing to get through a whole pile and doing a really bad job of transferring markings and such. Anyhow, if there are others out there who use cutting mats preferentially and effectively, could you please let me know what you think I should go with? Feel free to get granular--do you use rotary cutters? what kind of pattern marking tools do you use? Are there any types/sizes easier to store than others? I'm really clueless here.