I'm Moving

to a new Blog location. Catch the new stuff here:

http://eleanors-closet.livejournal.com/

God Save the Queen

Several of us from Gardner's Company received a huge honor today. Several of our guys were invited to serve as an honor guard for the Queen of England's visit today, and boy was it awesome!

At first it seemed that the women of Gardner's were going to be grouped along with the public, which was fine, but things improved dramatically once we were on site.

We were able to commandeer a most excellent vantage point.

And we were able to see just about everything from here, particularly our guys looking absolutely splended as the honor guard when the Queen left the Fort. Ron is in the foreground and Tom is in the background (most clearly, anyway). You can see Harv as well.

How awesome was that!

I'm back again

I got back from my trip to Arkansas last week, but I had to fly down to San Antonio yesterday for a quick meeting. It's good to be back and in my own bed, at least for a couple of days. I can't elaborate on the next trip until we're back. It should be interesting.

But in between trips, we met up with some friends and went to the Fort Frederick Market Fair, held at Fort Frederick. This is strictly an 18th Century fair, and the vendors are held to that standard. It's a great event to find things like wools, linens, linen tape, iron ware, and general camp stuff. Some stuff is just out of our time period, but it's still fun to admire the artistry. Most of the vendors create their goods, so unlike Pennsic, there are very, very few "junk stores." Smoke and Fire was about the "junkiest" but they still have to sell 18th Century items or reproductions, so there wasn't any Wal-mart finds laying around.


The woman selling bread out of her cart grew the grains, ground them to flour and baked the breads. While pretty expensive, they were pretty awesome.











This is the stall that friends of ours were selling some 18th Century wares. Kelly is an excellent seamstress and has been doing fairly well sewing things for the Fort McHenry crowd and others. The tea urn is her acquisition for making tea and keeping it warm. She was awfully happy to find that!








There was a lady making baked goods in her brick/clay oven. Believe it or not, this is not a permanent structure. I got to talk with the proprietress and she was very interesting. Unfortunately she was done with her baking by the time we made it to her stall.









And this is my purchase. A 1790 reproduction reflector oven. Obviously I can't use it for Elizabethan stuff, but Fort McHenry, you bet! This makes some awesome roasted meats. I can't wait until September when we can break this in! This was a rather expensive purchase, and Jim can tell you I agonized over it. I tend to talk myself out of expensive purchases.

The Bandes did purchase some things, a few Father Christmas gifts, some iron table legs, and a couple of iron trivits. I personally also picked up a new grill. The tin monger and the iron monger were very happy to see us.