Customer Quilts & FLL
I've had a busy few weeks. I've been working on a few customer quilts and we had the FLL State tourney over the weekend.
All in all, things came out pretty well.
Here is Annie's quilt. This one was quite large and she chose an orange peel design for it.
I just love the backing fabric she used. (Note to self--buy some. And travel more.)
Next up was Denise's quilt. She chose custom quilting on this one and it is a really special quilt. Pressure on! :) I spent around 24 hours working on this one and I'm pretty pleased with how it came out.
I finished it Thursday morning. Here's all the different stuff I used while quilting--four different long arm rulers, a regular ruler, seam ripper, tweezers, marking utensils, scissors, needle to bury tails, glasses, spray bottle with water, and the plan I drew out with markings and measurements, which ended up being a huge help to keep myself on track.
Friday night we had our guild Christmas party and then Saturday was the big day--our last-ever FLL State tournament. We left the house at 6:30 a.m. and got home after 9:30 p.m. We ended up taking first place in robot performance. That means we got the highest robot score of the 24 teams competing. You get three tries at the robot and only the top score counts. My son and his robot partner went in to the last round knowing we needed a perfect run to clinch the title. And we got it. I think it was the most satisfying robot run we've ever had. Those two work beautifully together, such smooth transitions, and even completing all the runs with time to spare. They made it look effortless.
We placed second overall, which has led the boys (a group of seven that are fine people) to dub themselves the B team. We seem to always finish second, year over year. I remind them every time that we do it with integrity, because most of the time the team that gets grand champion at the state level and gets to move on has a high level of parental involvement in designing and programming the robot. The kids and the other teams all know, but somehow those particular teams always manage to fool the judges. I guess that's life, but it's always disheartening to me to see that some of the other teams' parents care more about the win than honor, good sportsmanship, etc. I feel sorry for those kids that their parents don't have more faith in them. Which is why our boys winning first in robot, knowing they did every bit of it, makes it so good.
So. Next year it's on to the next stage of robot, FTC. And I am hanging up my coaching hat (three years directly involved, six total years we've been doing this) because there isn't a project or Core Values at the next level, so I am of zero help. I have absolutely no mechanical or programming ability. In fact, I only learned how to run the FLL robot (which button to push to make it move after it's been programmed) about a month ago. And then I promptly pushed the wrong button and made it malfunction. Oops!
I have a ton of things I need to get done that I've let slide over the past six weeks. I'm still on step one of the Bonnie Hunter mystery. I'm not done with Christmas shopping, haven't wrapped anything, and the house is a wreck. I did do some cleaning yesterday and need to finish up with the floors today, but there's clutter everywhere. And until we finish the rest of the basement, there will continue to be clutter everywhere.
Here's the room with the carpet installed. The guy damaged the trim in a few places, so that room is now in limbo while we try to resolve it with the installation company.
I can't remember if I mentioned before that we need to replace all our windows because they are defective. We replaced the two in the newly finished room over the summer, but all the upstairs ones need to be exchanged too. The first group of those is in, so the upstairs will be torn up more as we need to remove all the trim on the inside and the siding on the outside in order to replace them.
I did work on these the other day. Just a bit of hand sewing and they'll be finished. They've been in the UFO pile for several years.
Here's hoping for a bit of sewing time before the holidays. May you have a peaceful holiday season.
Linking with For the love of geese and From Bolt to Beauty.
Beautiful job on the custom quilting. It's such a shame when parents gets involved. While the kids may be basking in the win today they will feel a tiny bit of shame in years to come. Good luck with the windows and thank you for linking up to Put your foot down. Merry Christmas.
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