Spinning! (new hobby)

I enrolled in a spinning class with a college friend who recently moved to the area. The local yarn store hosts a two-session class with a very nice guy named Aaron. He somehow keeps a calm, even tone while all of his pupils are simultaneously creating massive wool nests and tangling their wheels up in ridiculous ways. 

The shop rents wheels to students, I got an Ashford Traditional (below right) and Anna got an Ashford Kiwi. I tried them both. The Kiwi is easier to keep going the correct direction, but my foot synchronization was off and I kept speeding up while using it. I've established a nice, nearly comatose treadling pace on the Traditional. 

Two Ashford spinning wheels in the dart room.

Our homework between classes is to fill two bobbins with yarn. During the second class we'll learn to ply them together. My first bobbin has quite a few corkscrews, I had some trouble getting my braking tension set properly. I've dialed it in better and I'm pretty pleased with the second bobbin. 

I was wondering to myself how long it would be before I rate colorful roving. Then at second Thanksgiving Anna kindly gave me some pretty purple stuff from her stash. I tried co-spinning it with some of the class roving. That was pretty tough. The purple was harder to draft so I kept ending up with patches of only one color. There must be some technique to blending the rovings.  I'm not sure I love the candy-cane look of purple on white but it might be nice with a more subtle color difference. 

First bobbin of yarn. I think this is the Corriedale.

Fun purple and grey gift-roving.

My second bobbin, probably Falkland. Half full with some purple and white candy-cane.

Fibonacci quilt nearing completion

The Fibonacci quilt came back from the quilter a few weeks ago and this today we spent a few hours getting the binding made and halfway attached. I need to pick up some black thread for the front-side stitching, then it will be done. Quilting with Nick seems to go much faster, probably partly because I don't get distracted as much, but also because it's way easier to manage a big piece of fabric with two people.

Front side - four Fibonacci spirals around a black square.

 

Back side - a sunset panel surrounded by extra fabric pieces from the front.

EPFL and Sauvabelin

From Maastricht we trained to Paris, figured out the connection from the Lyon train station to the South train station, then took another train to Lausanne, Switzerland. We must have looked super lost in Paris because two different guys tried to scam us. Luckily we're super suspicious people. 

Varun was working our first day in Lausanne so we joined him at EPFL for lunch and to see the campus. We visited the Rolex Learning Center, which was really cool but beyond our ability to photograph. So I borrowed this picture from their website:

Not my picture of the Rolex Learning Center

 

Underneath the Rolex Center

Nell trying out a reading nook in the library gift shop

A funny rainbow sculpture in one of the swiss cheese holes. 

After lunch at the EPFL cafeteria we walked down the hill to Lake Geneva. It was so hazy we didn't realize there were awesome mountains just across the lake until we were almost at the water's edge. Unfortunately, is was hazy down by the lake the whole time we were there. Varun assured us that it is breathtaking most of the time.
 

Nick with lake and faint mountains

Nell with an awesome pelican statue

We spent the afternoon hiking in the Sauvabelin forest. It's a really nice forest park kind of stuck into the uphill part of the city. It has a lake and a little farm zoo and a big wooden spiral tower. The tower was really neat; it was made of stacked wooden beams each at a small angle to the one below. You walked up the outer edge like a spiral staircase. A low rope fence keeps you from wandering too close in to the axis, which is very steep. I liked that in Switzerland dangerous things were marked but not really blocked off. They just want to draw your attention to the fact that there is a mistake to be made, the rest is up to you. 

Our first view of the tower through the trees

Nell at the top, with Lausanne and Lake Geneva in the background

Looking up...looking down is pretty similar but less sunny

Hairy pigs! They're so grimy

Little bitty sheep

Slightly less little sheep

Around the World quilt and quilt design wall

This post is a two-fer. Brian made me an awesome quilt design wall. He covered six foam insulation boards with quilt batting and hung them up. Fabric sticks to the batting if you smooth it on a bit. I'm using it here to showcase the outer rows of my Around the World quilt. It's been on pause while we worked on the Fibonacci quilt, which went off to the quilter last weekend. Now that I'm back to the Around the World quilt I've realized it's nearly done. Woot! Stay posted. 

 

Solar powered apple dryer

Nick, Scott and I are constructing a solar powered apple dryer to improve our dehydration efficiency come autumn. Last year we used the oven and a big computer fan. It was non-ideal: too little space, too high of a temperature, too great a risk of melting a computer fan. 

Scott modified the very swanky design described here to reflect our more modest aims; and the fact that we already had a spare storm window and bookshelf. Today we assembled the heat generation zone. Next it needs racks, doors, and a vent. Then we just need a sunny day and some test apples.

Fatty Lumpkin progress

I've been making tracks on the crochet motifs for my Fatty Lumpkin horse. The final stuffed animal is assembled out of 17 pentagons, 15 hexagons, and a handful of heptagons, quardragons and trigons. The final product, crocheted and assembled by a pro, would look something like this:

Fatty Lumpkin, as crocheted by the designer.

 So far, my pony looks like this:

16 pentagons

 It took me a while to make the first pentagon because it wouldn't lay flat, I had to decrease some of the double crochets to half-double crochets, but I sorted it out. Now I can do about one motif per episode of Daredevil. Or Deep Space Nine, depending.

Maastricht

From London we took a train under the English Channel and through bits of France and Belgium to Maastricht, in the very most southern bit of the Netherlands. We have several several friends from school working for DSM, teaching, and post-doc hunting in the area. 

Nancy and Hendrik took us on a tour of Fort St. Pieter and the caves underneath it. The fort was pretty neat, especially if you like cannons and sympathetic claustrophobia, but the caves were the highlight. They were carved by farmer/miners over centuries and now there are thousands of tunnels with over 80 km total length. At one point our guide took the lanterns off around a few corners to let us see how dark it was. We all walked along with one hand on the wall and one on the person in front of us until we caught back up with him. It was really neat and surprisingly spooky.

At the St. Pieter cafe overlooking Maastricht with Nancy and Hendrik.

Depth map of the local geography.

The mine walls had charcoal paintings of former local fauna and events of historical significance.

The nice thing about a mine, as opposed to a cave, is that you can decorate the place without (further) defiling nature.

Map of the mine, I think we followed the blue line. The fort is up behind our guide's wrist.

On Sunday we visited David and Juliana and took a stroll to Germany. The countryside was all beautiful and green, covered in cows and diced up by little streams. We walked for a couple of miles to get our appetites up for the smoked pork with fried veggies and broiled cheese on this neat contraption whose name is escaping me. It was so tasty. And I had a lambic. 

Everyone but Juliana, just barely not in Germany.

 Not pictured: delicious spicy Thai, acid-meat, french fries with everything, vlaai, crepes with jam, yogurt from a box with jam, coffee table bouldering, Chrononauts, SpaceTeam, and a proper game of Resistance for the first time in forever.

Easter eggs

Brian and I visited friends in Philly over the weekend and did some egg dying. This reminded me that I want to try out batik dying sometime this summer. The egg dying was hit and miss until JP pulled out her fancy tape. The pair that we masked turned out awesome. I really like how the blue dye bled under the tape.

Cool crochet pony

I find myself, for the first time in a long while, without a fiber project. I finished Dad's hat and Mason's hat and I don't feel like anyone else is in urgent need of a hat. Summer is coming, yo. I'll get a picture of Dad's hat before I send it off, I'll have to beg Carrie for a picture of Mason's.

Below is the current state of my stash:

 I want to turn the medium weight subset into this without, you know, a whole lot of effort.

London

Nick and I went to Europe to visit our far-flung friends. It was a hoot. First stop: London to see Raj and Vivek. Varun came out for a few days as well. We traipsed past the Victoria Memorial between stops on our culinary tour of London.

We visited the Sherlock Holmes museum and hiked all over London in search of fresh squeezed orange juice. Nick had miraculous international data on his tablet so we got lost less than you might expect. 

We rode the underground out to Richmond and hiked back along the Thames. To fortify ourselves, delicious chocolates and gelato were obtained from Danieli on the Green. THe original prime meridian was marked on the path. We had lunch in a bar where we confounded the waitress by asking if the cider was hard. Later, we played fetch with a Fox Terrier and talked with her very friendly owner for a while.

 
Our last day we spend in Oxford, visiting Balliol and punting. Nick got a haircut and I found a cute little game shop where we picked up Cthulu Gloom for Raj and Vivek and a book of goemtric quilt patterns for me.

 Not pictured: many games of Gloom, 7 Wonders, and Chrononauts. Delicious Indian curries and dosas. The space-age shower.

Pirate hat done

I finished the double knit pirate hat. Hopefully I'll have the good sense to do stranded colorwork from now on. Switching knit-side to purl-side and back was taxing my elbow. It did make the hat warm and reversible though. It takes two pictures to capture the bonefish: