"Trapunto" was the word that ruined Annandale seventh-grader Christina Huling’s chance at a State Spelling Bee title last week and a trip to the national bee in Washington, D.C. Instead, the accomplished speller had to settle for fourth place, which is still an impressive finish. "To get down to the final four you have to be such a good speller, and she is," said Sandy Greve, teacher of gifted and talented students at Annandale Middle School. Huling earned a spot at the state bee, held Thursday, March 12, at the Big Wood Event Center in Fergus Falls, with 20 other spellers by winning the regional event for the second year in a row. Wearing the same lucky outfit and bee shoes she wore in the regional, Huling spelled "muumuu, croquet, jovial, spinet, kudzu, recalcitrant, maelstrom, innocuous" and "croesus" correctly. But she missed in the 10th round with one other speller. Three others went on. J. Ryne Kisch from Barnesville won the bee. Although Huling said she knew all of the words she was given up until "trapunto," she was very nervous because right before the contest organizers announced spellers would not be able to use paper and pencil. Last year after the state competition, Huling said being able to write the word down helped her throughout the competition. While she found she really didn’t need to see the word to spell it Thursday, the nerves brought on by the announcement may have contributed to her elimination in the 10th round. "She got a word I had never heard of," Greve said. "She looked at me and I thought, ‘She doesn’t know it.’ But she was still only one letter off." "I kind of panicked," the seventh-grader said. "I asked for the language of origin. Most Latin words are spelled the way they sound." After some thought she produced t-r-e-p-u-n-t-o, which was one vowel, "e," away from the correct spelling. She said she had never heard the word before. According to Wikepedia, trapunto is a whole cloth quilting technique that produces a raised surface on the quilt. Since the spelling bee is open to students in the fifth through eighth grades, Huling still has one more shot at going on to nationals. That will mean more studying and more memorization of even harder, more obscure words. But she figures she’ll wait at least until the beginning of the new school year to start preparing.
