New Covers!

You saw it first here, folks: the new covers for Daughter of Liberty and Native Son!!! I am ecstatic!! My designer, Marisa Jackson, is the BEST, and these covers are top of the line!!!

So give me some feedback. What do you think? I’d love to get your reactions!!

More Gathering at Five Medals

Here are more views of the encampment. We’ll start with a photo of two young ladies nicely attired in colonial garb. I particularly admired them as they appeared to be quite at home in their period garb.

I got to the park a little after 12:30, and many of the reenactors were cooking their midday meal. The next two photos show something that particularly interested me. The young women were cooking roasted potato soup, and their campfire was suspended in a type of cradle. I’ve never seen anything like it before. They told me the Ojibwas and another tribe, which I’ve forgotten, used a similar type of device. I can see how useful it would be when the ground was muddy after rain.

This photo was taken at a camp where the woman shown was drying squash in a wooden rack over the fire. She had many gourds, squash, and other vegetables that she grows from heritage seeds, which she saves from her harvest year by year. She had packets of many different kinds for sale, and I meant to go back and get some before I left. But by the time I’d wandered around the camp for several hours, my poor knees were very unhappy with me. So I ended up limping all the way back to my car with a few treasures and heading home.

I must say, I’m not at all happy with blogger’s latest upgrades. It’s now impossible to resize photos manually in the post, so I had to set them all to small to avoid having text crunched when I use photos that are landscape orientation. Which means you have to click on the photo to get a good view of it. And when you move them around in the post, they break up the text. Not only can’t you can’t get a decent copyflow, depending on how you place them, they run over part of the text! Then to delete them, you have to go into edit html and delete the code. You can’t do it in compose view.

I wonder what other nasty surprises I haven’t discovered yet. I just love it how software companies and online sites “improve” their software or service so that it’s actually harder to use and lacks features that were particularly helpful before! Nice going, google! This is a perfect example of if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!!

Ah, well. Up in my next post: spinning and knitting. And as soon as I get the jpegs of the new Daughter of Liberty and Native Son covers, I’ll post those too. They are gorgeous, and I am soooo excited!!!

This morning I headed out to River Preserve County Park, southeast of Goshen, for the Gathering at Five Medals, a reenactment of the history of the Midwest from the 1660s to 1828. After days of cold and copious rain, the sun came out, the ground dried out, and the temps hovered around 60 degrees. So it was a very pleasant day, and the setting was lovely. Not so lovely, the encampment was pretty spread out, which was very nice in appearance but really hard on my knees. So I was one tired puppy by the time I hoofed it back to my car, but very happy that I went.

According to the brochure about the event, the Elkhart River Potawatomi first settled in the area during the 1760s. Five Medals Town, named after Chief Five Medals, was located near the reenactment site. The town was active in the fur trade and was frequently visited by European and American fur traders. During the War of 1812, young warriors from the town allied with Tecumseh and the British. Soldiers from Ohio and Kentucky destroyed the town twice during the conflict.

Accounts from travelers, military officers, and Indian agents describe twenty homes, surrounded by sixty to seventy acres of corn, situated along an extensive prairie. As white settlers pushed west, displaced Miami and Kickapoo from Ohio often settled briefly in the town before moving on. In 1828, as Americans settled the area, the town was abandoned and its residents moved west and merged with a different tribal group.

The event included a variety of sutlers, period craft demonstrations, artillery and weapons demonstrations, fur trade reenactment, River Rogues, and a Woodland Indian village and Voyageurs encampment. I enjoyed walking around—until my knees got too sore—and talking with the reenactors about the crafts they were doing and the characters they portrayed. I picked up a wonderful little book titled Some Thoughts on Scouts and Spies by Gerry Barker that promises to be a gold mine of information. And I also got several packets of wild rice mixtures and one of dried veggies that will be delicious as side dishes with our meals. And I found a sweet, inexpensive little embroidered bag to go with my petticoat.

In the next few posts I’m going to share some of the interesting photos I took. First up are a couple of young women who immediately attracted me, as they were portraying couriers. Both were garbed as me, and we had a very interesting discussion about the role of women during the American Revolution as spies, couriers, and even soldiers. Imagine that! So I gave the young woman on the black horse my card and asked her to email me so we could continue the discussion and I could ask her questions. What a fortuitous meeting!

In my next post, I’ll share more pix and interesting tidbits of info that I gleaned. And of course, I should have a cover or two to share before too long! But for now, Jay has gotten home from Alabama (after stopping to have lunch with my daughters in Noblesville). We’re heading into Bristol to check out the little pizza parlor—now that we’re about to head back down south!—and then walk down to the Stone Soup Emporium. We’ve only been here since mid March, and there are still a lot of places we haven’t taken the time to visit, so we’d better get busy!

Catching Up

What a week this has been! I got back from my jaunt to Greenville Sunday evening and plunged right back into the daily grind on Monday. Today is the first day I’ve been able to come up for air—but only briefly before I get back to finishing up the last few tasks left over from the week. Oy veh!

What a great experience I had with Laura and her mom Chris . . . and her dad Chris! There’s nothing better than making wonderful new friends, and I’ve adopted them. lol! I’m already looking forward to next year and hoping I can keep that weekend free. The morning was rainy again, but the afternoon cleared up a bit and there was a lot of traffic to the festival. It’s exciting to see how people in the area support this event! Here are a couple more pix I snapped on Sunday afternoon—a group of reeneactors whose authentic period costume just begged to be snapped, and the matched team that hauled the shuttle wagon. Aren’t they beautiful guys?

This entire week has been cold, rainy, and windy. Which means it’s been good for staying inside and getting work done. It’s hard to stay organized when two people are living in a 344 square foot 5th wheel, though, so I’m having to improvise, like spreading papers across the furniture and floor while I’m working, then gathering them up again once I’m done. Boy, do I have a ton of filing to do. It’s not on the top of my priority list, though, so the piles keep getting taller!

We’ll be heading back to Tennessee later this month, and if it gets cold enough this winter, we’ll probably spend a couple of months or so in Florida. I have to admit I’m sad to be leaving northern Indiana, but hopefully we’ll be back when it warms up next spring. It looks like we’re going to be nomads for a while.

Work is progressing on the new covers for Daughter of Liberty and Native Son. My designer told me she’ll have roughs for me next weekend, and of course I’ll share them here. I am sooooo excited—can’t wait to see them!!