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Removable Legs

I have a little bench that I sit on while doing my craft demo that I used some modern hardware to screw on the legs so they are easy to remove, transport and store between events. To make it look as if the legs have tenons set in holes drilled through the seat of the bench, I drilled blind holes in the top of the bench and then glued in some round plugs, cut off flush with the surface so they look like they are the tenons of the leg joint. I would have just put mortise and tenon joints to begin with, but I wnaated a long-wearing collapsable bench, and with the variations in humidity here in the Minnesota, I assumed they would be too hard to remove in damp weather, and eventually become too loose. At right is a view of the bottom hardware and the top false tenon


Quick Dinners

When we were just re-enactors, and not trying to make a living selling things at historic events we cooked period meals over an open fire. But when you are trying to service your customers all day it's not always convenient to cook over a fire (-and I hate washing dishes in the dark!!) so we cheat and hide a propane stove in one of our sleeping tents.
For a while, we brought pre-cooked meals that we freezed in gallon ziplock bags and would dump in a pot to warm on the portable stove for dinner. Then someone suggested boil-in-the-bag meals! We found a "Daisy Seal-a-Meal" at our local hardware store, so we seal a variety of individual meals in the bags, and we have the hot water left from cooking them to wash the dishes, and no nasty cooking pot to wash. When we don't have time to cook we buy a variety of frozen dinners and transfer them into the boil-in-bags since commercial boil-in-bag meals are not commonin the freezer department anymore.

More Quick Dinners

We bought ourselves a Hamilton Beach Grill ( -a larger spin-off of the George Forman Grill) for our home and now use it 2-3 times a week. You pre-heat it for 5 minutes, while it's heating you prepare and season whatever you're cooking and in another 5-8 minutes of cooking time you can have four marinated chicken breasts.They are more versitile that people realize. You can do things like Foccacia sandwiches, fajitas, even no-stir "stir fry" recipes. If we had electricity in our Renfair booth it would be great for a variety of quick suppers or lunches.

Retractable casters?

On the New Yankee Workshop on PBS, Norm just made an "assembly table" with casters on it that can fold out of the way, so the table is solid on the floor while in use, but is very mobile between uses. The casters were attached to a hinged board that folds up to retract them and when the casters are down, there are two smaller hinged boards that flip down to hold the caster board in place. To retract the casters you just pulled on a rope to pull the small boards out of the way. The direct link to a drawing on the the New Yankee website is http://www.newyankee.com/GetProduct2.cgi?0207
I've been trying to think how a similar design might work underneath a heavy box, or chest.

Juried Show Webpage?

Most juried shows want actual photographs or slides of your wares, but perhaps in time more will be able to look at your website to consider your stuff instead of have using hard copies. We've had a couple stricter reenactment events recently that in addition to information on our wares, wanted photos of our period tentage as well as our historic attire. So I started working on a page on our website specificaly devoted to information for vender coordinators. When we send out applications to new shows I'll include a note with the URL. I've got a rough draft of it at http://www.historicgames.com/jury.html Eventually I want to add photos of us in costume from a couple different eras, as well as some shots showing patrons playing games in our booth/gaming hall.

Alfric's Cart & Glastonbury Chair

Photos and plans for a Medieval chair and a small cart
http://home.attbi.com/~blkhrse/wsb/html/view.cgi-photos.html-.html