You may have guessed that I’m not spectacular at updating on a super regular schedule. I’m sure there’s a fancy way of subscribing, or tossing this in an RSS feed or something brilliant that I haven’t looked into yet if you really want to make sure you keep up on my irregular posts, or you can just hope for a nice surprise when you remember to stop by. 🙂

This past weekend was Fruits of Our Labours (aka FooL), which is the first camping event of the season. It’s also one of my favourite camping events as it’s all A&S, all the time, baybeee! The fact that it was my second event, my husband’s first AND where I got my AoA are all just gravy on top of delicious. It’s full of formal teaching, informal teaching, hanging out with artisans doing their thing and generally a whole lot of abject geekery and awesome. This ranges from pastry classes to music classes to blacksmithing, stained glass, weaving, to anything a teacher can be conjured for. Mix in fencing, heavy fighting, archery and thrown weapons and you need about 4 clones to fully appreciate the whole of the event.

I learned after my first fool (This year was my 3rd) to ease up a bit on the non-stop classes, not because I’m not interested, but I ended up exhausted with brain full waaaay too early and missed out on the casual hanging and conversations and the like. I think this year, I finally found a good mix. Teach one, take 4 classes over 2 days and there was plenty of lounge, chatter and plot time.

I taught Pysanky to 5 delightful ladies (and one adorable baby who was snuggled up with her Mum), and there was a range of skills from never tried before, to woefully out of practice. We had no dropped eggs! I had it scheduled for 2 hrs, and because we ran right up to court, we couldn’t linger, and we needed more time. When I do it again (and I will), I’ll have to work out how to make that work better. Rushing is not a feature in pysanky and you lose out on some of the best part of the zen meditative that makes it so delightful when you’re up against a time crunch. I needed a few more photocopies too, but we managed. 

Classes that I took were pastry making, period cooking tools, getting to know your dremel and the choral workshop. Which is a whole lot of brain info and awesome and learning, and very few concrete THINGS or new projects coming home with me. Which is a feature, all in all. 

Kitty was hanging out on a period grill (OMG SO COOL!) and being threatened by a Countess during that class.

Kitty was not allowed to use the dremel during that class, but I did let her pose with my finished plant stake. As we only have one plant that we’ve actually planted on purpose at our house, clearly Quince Tree the Second needed a name tag. I only had room for Quince though, rather than the whole thing. I also learned in that class that my selection of bits for my dremel is basically awful, and that could explain a lot of why I couldn’t seem to do anything I wanted. There will be keeping an eye out for sales on more bits. (And thank you Gwyn for letting me borrow yours!)

Camping was cold overnight (this is the first year we’ve been tent camping at FooL), but delightful generally (must work on the bed situation before Pennsic). New chairs are win, I’ve no clue how the pop up keeps popping up, but it survived another event and the mosquitos eventually just won. There was new class plotting, and more class plotting, and impromptu bobbin lace classes and the people just make this event so much delight and awesome.

Now we get to look forward to camping at Trillies!