Wednesday, May 7, 2014

An Exciting Announcement!

There have been lots of plans in the works, friends, and many exciting things to come! Two weeks ago, Elizabeth Stewart Clark of the Sewing Academy came out for a workshop series with the Living History Society. I will write more about that in a separate post, but as a teaser: her butt has been in the front seat of my car. (Insert fangirl screaming here)

Prior to that, however, Melissa of The Deviant Dressmaker (aka my protege) and I launched an exciting new blog project: The Historical Food Fortnightly!


I approached Melissa with this idea some months ago, and still don't remember how it popped into my head - a year's worth of challenges, every two weeks, asking participants to research, document and reproduce historical food dishes and recipes. She thought it was a cool idea too, so we've been plotting and scheming over the winter and have now launched the project!

The idea is shamelessly inspired by other fortnightly challenges from around the interwebz (in particular Leimomi of The Dreamstress, who has given us her blessing). Every two weeks (or fortnight - get it?), a new themed challenge begins. Each participant creates a dish inspired by that theme. They then post their results on their blog, along with their documentation and research. We'll share our own results, and highlight some participants as well.

We announced the project two weeks ago, and the response has been overwhelming. We're already close to 200 participants on the Facebook group, plus blog followers. We have people participating from all over the world, and from all different eras. There are professional living historians who cook historic foods every day at their sites, hobbyists with a variety of experiences and skill sets, historians who like food, and foodies who like history. There are people cooking foods from the 1950s all the way down to 10th century Vikings and Ancient Greece (like, I can't even wrap my mind around that, they must be made of magic).

I hope you will consider joining us, gentle reader - the only rule is "research and document", the rest is up to you!

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