by erin thursby scopes1925@msn.com
What: Hoggetown Medieval Faire
When: Friday February 1st 9:30 am- 3 pm, Saturday and Sunday February 2nd &3rd 10 am- 6 pm.
Where: Alachua County Fairgrounds in Gainesville, FL
Many of the people you’ll find at the Hoggetown Faire in Gainesville are dedicated to preserving crafts that have since been lost. Thinking about that, I had to wonder—would Hoggetown survive the apocalypse?
Right now, the average person really knows how to do very little. For example, most people can’t sew, whether it’s by machine or by hand, and an even tinier percentage know how to weave cloth. If we suddenly didn’t have a source for machine-made clothing or cloth, something that was a quaint hobby would become incredibly valuable.
I watched Monica Babb on the wooden loom, as she carefully wove the cloth. She doesn’t always spin her own yarn (each hour of weaving cloth means you must spend ten times that spinning the thread) but she does have the tools and the know-how. She demonstrated how to spin, with a primitive hand-held spinner. The stone weight at the end of the spinner was about 300 years old, and it had been used as a spinner head even that long ago. Different techniques were demonstrated at the Society of Creative Anachronism tent, such as loom weaving and card weaving.
Humans always need containers. We are the only animal (as far as I know) to carry Prada bags. Baskets are one of the ancient containers we’ve used and carried. A machine can’t make a basket, at least not consistently and successfully.
Sherry Wetzel is one of the youngest professional basket weavers in the North/Central Florida area. She’s also part of the SCA tent at Hoggetown. Basket weaving, she says, is one thing “machines have never been able to do.” Each piece of wood is different, and you need a human touch to guide and assess what the wood will do and how much tension to put on it.
Another container, which must be airtight, is the drinking container. The SCA tent has a horn carver, Daniel R. Barker, who carves horns (mostly from cows) into drinking cups and ornate boxes. He’s also not stranger to creating a weapon, and was in the midst of carving a wax model for a sword pommel when we spoke.
Even if a skill isn’t useful in a post-apocalyptic world, it’s still a comfort for people to know that someone still knows how. Arts such as egg painting, enamel work and old jewelry-making techniques can be found around the faire.
The apocalypse can come in many forms. Disease, bombings, zombies. Whatever form it comes in, we know that there’s bound to be a breakdown in some of the things we’ve come to rely on. What happens when we’ve spent the last round of ammo on those killer zombies? It will be the folks from the Society for Creative Anachronism that will still know how to make arrows and forge crossbows and bad-ass swords.
Maybe that’s a little far-fetched, but the fact remains that we are a society that doesn’t know how to make anything. We buy everything. I have to think that somehow that consumerism is damaging to us as people and as a society. Besides the silly clothes and the jousts, that’s why people come to reenactments and events such as the Hoggetown Medieval Faire. They want to remember that there are people who can do things that everybody else has forgotten.
Hoggetown Medieval Faire will be running this weekend at the Alachua County Fairgrounds in Gainesville, FL.
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