(no subject)

Here are the pictures of the type of gown that I'm hopefully going to make one day

The style is called Burgundian and is mid to late 15th century.  The pic on the far right is of me in my normal medieval civilian kit at the Huntingdon 800, cannot find a good one of me in fighting kit yet.

I have found some pictures with the material in the V just being plain and in a contrasting colour rather than embroidered, so I'll probably go that route. Because the V panal is detachable I could always get an embroidered one later on.

All the kit I have so far I have hand sewn, mainly because a lot of it was made before I got the sewing machine, as well as the fact that the  public at the reeanctment events that I go to tend to like to point out when they think something is wrong with the kit - ie machine sewn.

That said a lot of the public questions are just plain weird, haven't worked out the oddest yet, although pointing at the camp fire and asking if it's real, or asking why the 13th castle/manor house etc was built so close to the airport or possibly the very strange "I'm sure they didn't have plants back then" would definately be in the running for it.

Looking forward to the event season though as there are a lot of really good venues scheduled, including Warwick castle, Whitby Abbey and Bosworth battlefield. Looks like being about 11 major events in total, all weekends between April and September. I'm like to do them all but I'm not sure I've got the time or money for that many, as I do have a life outside reenactment, although some of my friends don't seem to think so, also as my other half doesn't do reenactment it might not be fair to abandon him for so many weekends, especially as in August there are 4 weekends in a row. He says he doesn't see the attraction of being hit with pointy sticks/blunt objects, wearing funny clothes, eating odd food (we cook medieval recipes) and sleeping in a tent.    
I've tried to convince him of the good sides of it, unfortunately some of the things I see as the good sides of it he's not keen on, like camp fires and the obligatory camp fire singing of an evening after the event's beer tent has finally emptied us out, or the battle reenactment 
itself.  There is nothing quite like it, especially when we do events at actual battlefield sites, standing there in the Yorkist line looking down  the field at the Lancastrians, seeing all the arrows (blunts thankfully) flying overhead, the smoke from the cannons going off and then the advance down the field, a slow march until the our Captain, W, gives the the signal for us to charge. 

I understand why quite a few women don't do it, or do archery rather than line fighting, some of the bruises you get can be impressive and a couple of the guys in the group broken bones last event season but it's no more dangerous than a lot of sports, at least thats how I look at it.  

Right, I think that I have bored people quite enough with reenactment for one evening, so I'm off now to get some of my old photos scanned as I realised that I don't even have the negetives to some of them anymore. That's mainly because a lot of them were taken on a disc camera. I'm pretty sure that they don't make those any more, so even if I could find the negetives I probably couldn't get them reprinted.