Hello all

Hi Everybody

Hope that all is well and doing great reenachment og crafts this summer.
We have been very absent from the blog over the last year. It´s not that we don´t do medieval or viking reenachtment - but our modern life have been taking a lot of time. And the time for making blog posts and such have been minimal. Still it is great to see so many new readers and that people still find it interesting to read ours post on medieval pies, woodworking, plant dyeing, and leatherworking.

One of the reasons that the time for blogging have been low is that we last June found out that we were expecting af little girl. She was to come in the early start of 2013. But despite of all ods she decided to come 10 weeks to early and we ended up spending 3 months at the hospital. Despite of the early start all went well and she is now big and growing as expected. We havent been on many markets since she came and the ones that we have been to have only been as modern turists. This weekend my workplace, Bork Viking Habour, had the big annual viking market. And we all went as vikings!

I had made viking clothes for Laurine - a little white smock in linnen, a yellow wollen apron dress with silk ribbons and tabletweaving, and a smal silk cap made from madderdyed needlebinding. She looked so cute and we were very much photografed. Here are some of the photos.

This last photo was taken by a Danish photografer, Jim Lyngvild. See other photoes of vikings on his Facebook page. He have just made a danish book about vikings and also a cookbook with viking food. 

Blogging at work - now also in english.

Thank you all for the response on the last post - we have now decided at the museum that the blog is also being written i english. The more the merrier!

So we hope that you will follow our project...

Blogging at work

I am fortunate to have a work were I work with living history. I work at a small viking village which lay in the buttom af the large Ringkøbing Fjord in the western part of Jutland. The village is called Bork Viking Habour and have been an active museum since 2000. We have araound 45.000 guest during our season wich goes from 1. of April til the end of October. During the year we have many different activities and in Juli and August have many turist who visit our museum.

To see more pictures go to our Facebooksite or go the museums webpage for more info

I have been working there for 2 years now. We have been expanding a lot the last couple of years - new exhibition on brigdebuilding and water mills and a new wooden church. In Denmark we have archealogical finds from th 10 century of wooden churches and the great rune stone in Jelling tells us that King Harald Bluetoth made the danes christen around the year 960. 

This year we have finished a new Haithabu house. They are based on the great finds from Haithabu and we have had both volunteers and crafts men to work on the houses. 

The plan is to build two of this type of houses which we can offer to vikings in the summer time and for school classes during May, June and September. The house was startet i april 2010 and eventhough we still need to do some small things it is almost done. And that brings me to the center of why I wanted to make this post.

At the moment we have a archealology student living in the house - for 10 weeks. This projekt is part of here master thesis where she will write about living conditions in vikinge age houses and focus on light, smoke and such. It is a great project and along th 10 weeks there will be 27 different people living with here in the house. In the picture below you can se the first tema before they move in to the house. 

We are very excited at Bork to have such a research done on our new house and have therefor made a blog so that you can follow Jannie and the house online. 

The project is called "Mennesket og huset" and so is the blog. At the moment the texts is only in danish but I´m considering to make the english as well is a lot of foreign readers starts following the blog. So please let me know if you want an english text. 

/Louise

A little teaser - the first post in a long time!

Everything have been standing a bit still here at the blog (this goes out to you, Peter!). I got a new job in April being a fulltime viking. A actually that is what it turned out to be - a lot of wonderfull work and not a lot off spare time. Mikkel and Simon have also been buzy. With work, studying, attending new and exciting events but also making diffentent projects. So eventhough we haven´t been writing so much our hands have been buzy. Mikkel and I have among a lot of things been making viking clothes. So this little update is a teaser for more posts to come!

Also we could like to say hi and much velcome to the many new readers here at Haandkraft. It is lovely to see so many people tuning in eventhough we haven´t written for at while.