What do you mean the last minute?

Ah... so it turns out that the end of this month is approaching with inconsiderate speed.  Meaning that the quilt Nellie and I are creating for Rachel Faller's May quilt show actually needs to be, uhm, done.  Woops?  I always forget about the hard parts of quilts, like... anything other than the piece-work.  Thank goodness for Nell (and her mom!) for reminding me that there is more to this quilt than design, piece-work and being gay!  

Here are some of the samples I made for the patterns (recognize any of the fabric, pickles?  It's all stuff I've dug out of the trash from work...  Someday I'll make a whole quilt with this shit...)  From left to right the patterns are:  Monkey Wrench, Flying Geese, Northern Star, Monkey Wrench, Bow Ties, and... Monkey Wrench.  (Oh- and there's Ripley, too.)

However... I was reminded why you're actually supposed to make samples before starting with your final fabric:  it turns out I kind of suck at quilting.  My measurements were crazy-wrong!  None of my triangles matched up and when I tried to make the Flying Geese block... somehow I only ended up with enough triangles to make half the pattern!  Woooops.  So I decided it was time to get help from a professional and I hopped a train to Baltimore.

Nellie and I worked all day yesterday!  (Well... technically we slept till 12:30... but after that we were... almost diligent.  Almost.)

We were lucky enough to be able to spread out in the costume studio of Baltimore's Center Stage Theater, which was equipped with all the necessary sewing supplies!

Then, by consulting both the Underground Railroad quilt code and the Gay Hanky code, we made color/block combinations that embodied imaginary individuals and their sexual proclivities.

And then we started sewing!  Nellie was a merciful tutor and took over sewing the super-complicated and curvy blocks.  (Thank goodness...)

By the end of the day we had finished a good number of squares (3.  I'm being optimistic, ok?) and we divvied up the rest of the tasks to work on in our different cities.  Hopefully we'll get everything done in time!  I'm going to be seeing a lot of hankies in the next couple of days...