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:

Civil War quilt quilting

Progress continues on the Civil War table quilt... I've quilted the two "leaf" sections, acquired the velcro to connect the segments, and bought the binding material. Woot. It's a good thing it's almost done, I am running low on steam. It will be very nice to have it on the table though. And to start something new. :P To buck myself up I made a batch of caramel, which turned out delicious.