Fort Ward

While many of you were basking in your post-Valentine's weekend, we were already well into our president's day celebrations, beginning with my new favorite president's day tradition: the revolutionary re-enactment a Fort Ward park! You may remember that we went last year (and blogged about it here).
We won the battle this year (I forget who won last year, but really, I know who won the war, which is what counts.)Apparently if you were a musician with the British army, you got an especially flamboyant uniform. This tradition has continued with British musicians down to the present day, as can be seen n the case of Elton John.Not all Hessians are from Hesse, so really, "hessian" is a politically incorrect term. You should probably call them Germanic Mercenaries, but since the actual Germanic Mercinaries didn't speak English, t probably didn't matter. Besides, after totally dropping the ball in Trenton, they're lucky they're still fighting.
There is some aspect of the male genetic code that drives a strong urge to find and wave sticks. Adult men seem to be able to control this and channel it into social acceptable activities like playing baseball, shooting pool, and fishing. Small boys, however, cannot be in contact with a grassy area without feeling the uncontrollable desire to locate a stick to wave. The ideal stick should vaguely resemble both a gun and a sword, it should be hefty enough to bruise the knees of all adults within a four-foot range, and, ideally, be long enough to poke your mother in the eye with. Sadly today there were many small boys about, and the stick pickings were slim.It is not generally known the extent to which yellow caution tape provided necessary crowd-control during the revolution. It was a smoky war (part of the fun of the reenactment is in getting a sense of just how loud and smoky it really was, in addition to actually seeing the occasional misfire, and watching all the jockeying for position that a battle involved), so without caution tape untold multitudes of farmers would accidentally have stumbled into the midst of a skirmish.
I know nothing about revolutionary-era artillery, but these guys sure look like sailors manning a small ship's gun. It must have been heavy, because whenever the highlanders got close, they abandoned this gun and stood safely behind the picnic table, whereas both the Brits and the patriots hauled their large cannon back and forth as their position changed.
And for those of you dying to reenact, but unsure what sde you'd like to join, the bottom line is: the redcoats have fancier hats.


but the patriots get to wear Davy Crockett shirts if they want.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Hope everyone's day was filled with sweet things!

Quilt!!

yeah, I'm a lazy blogger. But I do have a quilt to show you!
see, quilty goodness. Actually, in this photo, no real quilting exists. This is just the quilt top, and you can also see batting. Immediately after this photo was snapped I pinned the ayers together (there's a backing too, which you can't see because its underneath the batting), and then the actual quilting began. If you read any quilting magazines you begin to believe that all quilters have piles of quilt tops just hanging around, all non-challant. There seem to be vast numbers of historic quilt tops too, inherited from relatives who would rather die than actually quilt. Apparently if you do choose to quilt and bind an heirloom top, you will gain a functioning bed cover (or wallhanging or whatever you use quilts for) but you'll heavily diminish the monetary value of the quilt, which can be either considerable, or nonexistent. At any rate, it seems like quilters, as a whole, aren't particularly fond of quilting. If they can afford it, it seems like a lot of quilters actually send out their tops to be professionally quilted. I, on the other hand, can't afford that, and I don't have the room to let my quilt tops languish (plus, lets face it, Ma would get a bit cranky if I started leaving unfinished quilt tops lying around. She's tolerated a partially finished one for a while, and I don't want to push things any further.). Initially I was going to machine quilt. I learned to actually quilt on a machine, and its plenty easy, if: 1) your quilt is small, as in placemat sized, 2) you only quilt in straight lines, and 3) you're using thin fabric and thin batting. But this is a pretty good-sized quilt: slightly smaller than twin-size, but absolutely bigger than a breadbasket, so after a few swipes with the machine I got annoyed and am now hand-quilting. It'll take much, much longer, but I'll curse at the Singer corporation less. I'm sure they're greatful. And, as a reward for reading my babble, here's a detail shot: