Bideford Heritage Day

I completely forgot to blog about this!
My town had another Heritage Day
this time celebrating our Elizabethan heritage.

My son made a ruff with this lady
and proudly wore it for the rest of the day!
I love that he still loves dressing up,
as a toddler he was always dressed up as something/someone, most often spiderman
and as he's got older he has got more creative in his choices .

we found out about lots of different aspects of Elizabethan life
we played the first ever patented board game and other games
we learned about what and how they cooked
and of course what they wore

both my children tried on the outfits
The boy was a bit shocked to hear that boys around his age still wore dresses!

look at this face of determination!
There was a lovely lady who showed us how to prepare the wool for spinning
and let him have a go at carding and then producing a yarn by hand he loved it!
She also showed us the different plants used to dye fabrics
and my favorite, buttons of the period!
There was also lots of ladies spinning wool which sparked my daughter's interest
as she has kept my Grandma's old spinning wheel
maybe one day she will learn how to use it.

It was a lovely way to spend a few hours with my children and it is so nice that they are both so interested in history and of course the heritage of our home town.
Bideford has a really interesting history which i've only really come to appreiciate as i've gotten older, it is the same way with my own family history, my Mum was always really interested and has done a lot of work tracing our family tree as did my Dad's Mum, i was never interested at all and pretty rude saying "who care's that's boring" but now i find it all fascinating!