Three Years Later...
Three years ago, Fat Quarter Shop hosted an EPP sew along. I bought all the things and stitched together the pieces in a somewhat timely fashion. Then I had to sew the finished piece to the background. And there it sat, in various stages of completion for close to three years!! Have I mentioned how much I dislike appliqué?
I finished stitching down the star to the background Monday night. I had enough backing fabric that I could hook it to my long arm. I was going to stitch a small, wavy line using a ruler. Well, the ruler was actually little scallops, not waves. So then I was going to try to use the Jane ruler I bought at MQX from Gina Perkes. This ruler does clamshells. You need to have a marked one-inch grid. I pulled out the stencils I bought from Dorie Hruska. They are all on the diagonal and I need a straight grid. So I marked it with my rotary cutting ruler and blue marker. I guess it's really easy to get slightly off while marking by hand. Enough that the accurate grid the ruler depends on is just not there. (Lesson learned: buy the stencils.) Okay, now I have a more-or-less one-inch grid marked all over the top. What do I do?
I finally decided to try doing an all-over continuous curve design, specifically, the Terry Twist(TM). Yes, that is a trademarked design. I thought the one inch was a bit small, and I did not feel confident in my ability to stitch it. So I went with a two-inch grid. I did much better than I expected. The one-inch would probably have looked a little better, but this mini quilt is finally done after three years. Good enough! Pattern is by Fat Quarter Shop, fabrics are Kona Snow and Meadowbloom by April Rosenthal.
Our FLL competition was Saturday. The boys did so well. We set goals to improve performance in Core Values and Project over last year and score at least 150 on the robot. While we haven't seen the judges' marks yet, we felt that we significantly improved Core Values and we thought our project was outstanding. Our robot crashed and burned during the table runs. We always expect a bit of that, but it was worse than normal this year. Our third run, the robot actually froze up and wouldn't run the program. Still, we got third place in robot score and third place overall, which means we're heading to state on December 1. And the middle school team, 3/4 of whom were on our teams during elementary school, also qualified for state and got a robot design trophy too. Overall a pretty good day!
My father-in-law is coming in just two more days! I cannot wait to see the cabinets. I don't think I mentioned, but he is also bringing a few more cabinets for my pantry. Those will enable us to store away the canning jars and accessories, along with a few rarely-used counter-top appliances. We've been busy trying to finish off a few small things in the sewing room and also picking up the main part of the basement so that there is a clear, clean path from the slider over to the sewing room to bring in the cabinets. My husband does outstanding work, but cleaning as he goes along (or at all) is not his strength. And the basement has been a construction zone for two years. Anyway, we're just about there and I cannot wait!
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