Storing the Jars

The Bloomington Watercolor Society will be hanging a show from December until February at the Monroe County Indiana Historical Society on the corner of 6th and Washington Streets.

The name of the show is BWS Paints the Bicentennial.   [It's Indiana's 200th anniversary of becoming a state this year.]   We can paint whatever subject we want, but for months I've been thinking about this painting.   I tried painting it a few different ways.   Finally I drew this one, but was too scared to paint it.  I knew in my head how I wanted it to look, but didn't know if I could do it.  So, I tucked it away and forgot about it.   Last weekend I found it and decided to take a deep breath and go for it.   I did it in 4 sittings over 3 days, which is much slower than I usually go.   But I had to get the layers right.  

I started by underpainting the gold light [aureolin] and purple shadows [pthalo blue and perm. alizarin crimson].   After that I worked on the dress, the crocks, the shelves and wall, the dress some more, then the hair, the skin, the box and finally the jars.   I tweaked a lot.

It looks better in person.  There are some things I really like about it - the glass jars, the box, the fact that she actually looks human [whew!]...

I'm trying to decide whether to hang this one in the Bicentennial show or the cornfields [below].  

Opinions?

Feast of the Hunter's Moon: The food

Churning butter

One of the things I liked best about the Feast is .... the feast.    I love the smell of wood fires and cooking food.   Love it.

We cook over our firepit a lot and everything tastes extra good flavored with a bit of woodsmoke.   Except eggplant.   But that's another post.

There is no electricity at the feast.  If it was cooked, it was cooked over a fire.    Food was kept cold in coolers and off site in refrigerator trucks.  

Here are just a few of the food vendors we saw at the Feast and some of the ways they were set up to cook the food there.    [There were a lot more that I didn't get photos of.   Too busy eating!]

Here's the setup used by the guys making buffalo stew.   Notice that gorgeous cauldron.    I want one.   They run about $500.  [Yes, five hundred.]   That's cheap because it's not a really big one.   Notice the knobs on the sides where you can rig it to chains to hang it over the fire.  

These guys put their cauldrons on triangular iron frames stuck deep into the ground and then they build the fire underneath.   The iron plates around the fire are used to control the temperature and block the wind.   Very smart.

Here's a pic of the buffalo stew.   They boil the vegetables for an hour and then put the meat in and cook it for another hour.   They did a brisk business. 

Here's another fire set up.    Notice the frame stuck into the ground on either side. 

Then there's a hanging unit with the rack on the bottom to hold the pots.   See how the hanger has knobs at different levels so you can raise and lower the rack to the height you want?    Cool!  The copper pot in the pic isn't on the rack, it's hanging from its own hook.   There were a few blacksmiths at the show that made hooks of different lengths so you can have different options when you're cooking.  Just move the pot from one hook to another as need be.

Notice the big cauldrons behind the copper pot set up!  They're on tripods.   Nice set up!

One of my favorite set ups was at the croquignolles booth.   Croquignolles are fried bread sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar, served hot with a French accent.    They were very tasty!  

I loved their set up.


 

They had a huge wooden frame with a long fire pit dug underneath and they hung their fry pots and coffee pots from chains wrapped around the frame. 

Here's a closer view of the fry pots and fire pit.   I ate one of those croquignolles.  It was delicious.

I heart sauerkraut!   I had mine on a venison brat, not in stew, but I had to show you this booth because it illustrated a great solution to the big question of How do you stir a big pot of something when it's cooking over an open fire?

You take a long narrow board, drill it full of holes, attach a long handle to it and give it to a kid.   This little guy stirred and stirred and stirred, back and forth.   Very practical!

The guy behind him has his board out of the stew and you can see the holes in it.   The holes are gauged to let the stew through so that the unit doesn't slosh things around.   They keep the pots full because they do a good business.

The last thing I want to show you is the difference in how the re-enactors set up their dining areas.  Here is a pic of one of the voyageur camp set ups.  They had a fire out back, but did all their eating on tables with china.   No sitting around a campfire for these nobles.

This is another camp set up from a significantly less noble camp.   They use the straw bales to sit on and protect the fire from wind.   

Small, but effective.   I love the hanging rack set up.

Rural Indiana - circa 1750

This year's Feast of the Hunter's Moon was at the end of September.   It's held at Fort Ouiatenon [we-aht-non] just outside Lafayette, Indiana, every year - sometimes at the end of September, sometimes the first weekend in October.  Check the site for dates.

This gathering is a recreation of the annual gathering of fur traders and native Americans at Fort Ouiatenon during the middle of the 18th century.   It's a wonderful combination of wood smoke, food, musket fire, bagpipes, role playing and education all rolled into one weekend.

Yes, people do dress up.   No, not everyone.   It's fun if you do and it's fun if you don't.

There is so much to see there and the experience is so rich on so many levels, that I'm going to do a series of posts, just so I can break it down into [sort of] manageable topics. 

The event prides itself on being as authentic as is practical.   All food is cooked on fires.   All vendors are in costume.  All tents are canvas and any tricks used to keep things up and dry are well camouflaged.

Tents and camps at the voyageur camp.  These often had tables and chairs and china.  

We arrived in the morning at opening - it was cloudy and misty and the air was full of woodsmoke.  The vast majority of people there at that hour are in costume.  Our kids were in costume, too.  Visually, it was amazing.  [Amazing is a completely inadequate word, but I can't think of anything else that remotely comes close.]   

[Photo: In the center of the voyageur camp was a large campfire, where a lot of the traders and children gathered.  It was chilly, so the fires were larger to provide some much needed heat.   These participants sleep in these tents, on site.   The fires are necessary.]


I can't tell you how much fun this event was.   The sights, the smells, the meals, the set up, the costumes, the wonderful demonstrations - I haven't had that much fun in ages.

There were HUNDREDS of people in costume.   Here are a few:

One of the things that caught my eye right away was the fact that people of all ages dressed up and participated.   This was a family event.  


How cute is this?  Notice her wooden shoes.

Another family, there for the day to play.  

















There was an abundance of soldiers.  If I were a great blogger, I'd tell you what each of these companies was, but I wasn't paying attention and don't know the costumes well enough to tell you.    My apologies.

 Soldiers with blue and red uniforms.














 Soldiers with fur uniforms












Soldiers with grey and green uniforms.














Soldiers with blue and white uniforms.









Each group of soldiers had its follwers - the women and families who cook and follow the camps.  [This was true historically, as well.]

We saw some great characters in these groups.  Look at her!

I wish I had gotten a better picture of the families in these groups.   Little ones in homemade wagons, toddlers led by the hand - everyone in costume. 

Part of the Indian encampment. 

K2 saw this and said it looked like a turkey exploded on his head.   You can't see the red and black face paint on this Indian.   Or the bare, tattooed legs and loin cloth.

Some of the Indian costumes were very elaborate.

So were some of the ladies' costumes.  There were fine ladies out and about, walking in groups, visiting the shops and food vendors.

These girls spent most of a year making their own costumes. 

More ladies in the encampments

There were fur traders.  A lot of these were in the voyageur camps.   [More on these and the canoes in the next post.]







We thought this guy's furs were pretty spectacular.  

















I want to emphasize the family nature of the event.    Families participated at every level of the event - participants and visitors. 

Historically, boys as young as 11 years old enlisted with the soldiers.

You'll note here the number of women dressed up as soldiers.  This, of course, was NOT done historically, except in rare cases.  One famous case of a woman impersonating a male soldier during the Revolutionary war was Deborah Sampson.   She worked hard to not get caught.  [Forgive the split infinite.  It's a rural Indiana thing.]

Part of a teen drum and fife corp

As we watched one fine drum and fife corp in the drum and fife competition, I thought about the teens who formed their own corp, got costumes, learned the pieces, learned the formations, found others to be in the group and then took the time to practice for the event.  That's a lot of time and effort.  How often do you see that?  My husband said, 'There is a world of kids out there that you never see on TV.'     Very true.

There is a whole world of all sorts of things out there that you never see on TV.