Stories from the Sewing Room

I finished my Grassy Creek quilt on February 1! I entered it in the IHQS and I have attached the label. I still need to attach the hanging sleeve. Once that's on, I'll get a better picture of it. Here are a few pictures for now.

The quilt is 92" x 92" and very heavy. I had to move furniture and stand on a chair to photo this. {I took a lot of photos of my legs and feet. Oops.}

I have sewn two more rows of the Log Cabin Stars quilt together. Remember, my design wall is behind my longarm, so it's usually quite difficult to get a good picture of whatever is on there. This is one weird looking quilt. LOL. I should have worked harder on color placement.

I'm also working on this month's Malted Mystery clue. I have two more white borders to sew on and then another round of the light green. Next month will be the reveal. I think I can figure out the rest since I took the sneak peek. I may work ahead, but will keep it to myself so as not to spoil the reveal for anyone.

I haven't yet started the SCQG quilt along project--Sun and Sand. I couldn't make a decision on the colors for the first two months, so I decided to start with month 3. But then...these pieces are really tiny. Which is the appropriate ruler to use in this case? Also, there are cutting directions given, but the pieces seem to be twice as big as needed. I'll need to do a test block with the sizes I think should be cut. 

Help! Which ruler?

As far as my OMG, nope. Haven't had a chance. Maybe this weekend. 

I have completed a few quilts for others. The first two belong to Amber. She requested loopy meander on the baby quilt and picked Ginger Heart for the yellow quilt.

Next I quilted Lovely Loops on Trish's baby quilt. 

Right now I am just about halfway through Carol's quilt. She picked Denali and Cool Mint thread. I hadn't stitched Denali in a while and forgot how slow it is. It has a ton of backtracking. It does, however, look fantastic on her quilt.

We had a robotics tournament last weekend. I did end up volunteering and worked as a line queuer again. Basically you make sure the teams are lined up ahead of their match and send them out to the appropriate field at the appropriate time. Our boys had a tough day. They lost their first three rounds and you could see them becoming a little more discouraged each time. Two of the boys had band competitions, so could not attend.

We felt good going in to the fourth match. They were paired with a stronger team than their morning matchups had been. They had a great autonomous portion, scoring 50 points, but their robot's arm came down on the field enclosure and the head ref gave them a yellow card instead of a penalty. He then told them they weren't allowed to pick up their controller to run the rest of the match. Somehow they ended up winning that round, which was very sweet because they were going against the number two seed. I think we were ranked 20 out of 28 at that point. We looked at the rules and found out that the ref should have called that only a penalty and they absolutely should have been able to play the rest of the match, but decided not to contest it since we had won anyway. 

Their last match of the day they were paired with the other team from our town. They ended up putting up the highest score in the state with that match and it moved us up to #14. The other team went into finals alliances as the number one seed. They picked the number two seed and us as their alliance team. And we won. We were of more help to the #1 team than the #2 team was, which made it even better. Our pair ups with team #1 are now the top four scores in the state, I think. Since both of those teams already had gotten state bids, we were able to move up into the state bid for the #1 alliance. The boys were so pumped!

Then we won the Design Award, given for best function and aesthetic. That was totally my son's work and nice to see their very reliable robot finally recognized. (Teams #1 and #2 spend most of their time between matches repairing everything.) So we had a lot of highs and lows, but it worked out in the end and our very introverted boys were just beaming. They also got a 3rd place Control Award for programming.

We have another competition this weekend (I think I'm gonna stay home and sew this time), then the state championship in one month.

I've managed to avoid jury duty so far. They didn't call my number for last week's trial and no trials were scheduled this week.

Linking with Quiltery, Confessions of a Fabric Addict, From Bolt to Beauty, and Alycia Quilts.