There's always more to buy

We went of to Cosmeston Mediaeval Village today. A fantastic place, and one of our favourite days out - although not particularly cheap as we have to pay to get into Wales (greedy Taffs!) and pay an entrance fee as it's not owned by Cadw (we are members & get free entry to English, Welsh & Scottish Heritgae sites), which it really ought to be.

However, today was not just a pleasure trip. There was a big re-enactment event there this weekend, and we needed a couple of bit's and pieces. I really want a butter churn for the kids, and would quite like a quern stone (Mstr A has done this before & is very good at it), and we needed some mor cloth to make various items of clothing. You'd think we could get that anywhere, but no - plain coloured pure woven wool is apparently impossible to find unless you go to a specialist supplier. Our favourite is Bernie the Bolt, who tours most of the re-enctment markets with some fantastic stuff, and he was at Cosmeston this weekend.

So we got there, and went to bernie first. Bought some more linen for shirt & underwear, some nice orange wool for a new dress for me, some irish linen for Aggie to have cool hose (trousers) for the summer, and some grey wool for a kirtle (overdress) for me & the girls as I've been meaning to make one for ages. throw in some braid, and that's £70 gone!

Don't get me wrong, that' a good price. especially as I had my last dress made for me and that cost £100! But still, £70 is a lot of money right now. So we wrote the cheque & wandered off around the site.

They had groups there representing everything from Greek Hoplites, through to Vikings, mediaeval, Tudor & even some riflemen from the 18th century, and every group had their own demonstrations & traders. Aggie thought he was in heaven:-)

We bought Mstr A a proper practise sword. He lost the baby one Aggie made for him when he dropped it in the moat at Caerphilly! He is under strict instructions to take better care of this one as it is being specially made for him! But it is time he started learning swordfighting, and a good wooden sword is an investment - better than sticks that break & are sharp, or "borrowed" metal short swords!

We also picked up a couple of cups for the kids & mugs for us, and new padded jacket for Aggie as he is an archer now not an axeman (it needs a different style of jacket apparently), and a new box to keep all of his leatherworking tools in as the old one was much too small - I get that for my sewing stuff now.

We chatted to lots of people & were recognised by a few - which was nice, then £200 lighter, and still with no butter churn or quirn stone, we headed home to start sewing!

Ah well. Aggie has pomised to sell his old padded jack on ebay, along with his old recurve bow, so that should recover some of the costs. And our Cyser is all nicely finished now too, so we have 14 bottles ready to barter within the group - although we do tend to drink a fair bit of it ourselves, and the ingrediant costs mean that we don't actually make anything on the final product. Still, it's a hobby innit?