Tools of the trade

You know how people say things that just stick out in your memory? I work with characters, each "unique" in her own way. Once a week, I assemble them all in a large conference room to get my story straight on where publications are, where they're going, and how soon we expect impact. This is where projects that you will someday come to know and love are named with their own individual nicknames like "Frankensweater" for a sweater that was assembled by a whole team of pattern testers in the effort to make a deadline...not the premium plan for model-making but we do what we must. We usually only do this for extreme cases...the team-stitch approach and the nickname.

This week we had a bunch (passel, flock, herd, murder...what's a big group of afghans called?) of afghans coming in that had to be turned right around to get to photography because they were behind schedule (it's kind of a theme around here, but not our doing this time). Quilts are easy to rush to photography. Basically, we pick the stack up and move it (after we trim some loose ends sometimes). Afghans...not so much. They must be pinned to within an inch of their lived to a blocking board (because the suckers start out a little rumpled), steamed, and then cooled, and then unpinned, tagged, folded, and stacked. Then we pick up the stack and move it to photography. Oh, well, and if there's fringe, we have to fork the fringe. "Forking the fringe" is one of my new favorite phrases. It's not as exciting as it sounds...you take a plastic fork and comb out the fringe and then trim it. "Forking the fringe" sounds so much more exciting, right? And now I'm reminded of a movie quote..."You know what's a weird word? Fork. Someone ate my whole pie. I don't know how that happened!" I'm pretty sure I'm the only person who's seen this movie enough to have it memorized. Pop culture strikes again.