July, 2009

Hey everyone,

Today’s the last day to comment on turtle names so get them in I will give you till  midnight tonight so please submit those comments with the names you want to give the turtles ok.  I will be posting the winner of two free passes to Plimoth Plantation some time July 22, 2009 so look  then ok.

Thanks

Tim

Hello Everyone,

I just wanted to talk a little about our pottery firing we did this weekend at Plimoth Plantation.  This is the 2 second year we had a bi-cultural pottery firing, that is to say we had Native and English way’s  of  firing pottery on display for our visitors to see how different we fired our pottery the 17 th century.  We did this on this weekend out side our craft center and it was a great success.  I would like to say great job to Kerri and Erin of Wampanoag Program and  Kristen, Ron, Martha, Mike, and Mark of the colonial Program , you are all very talented people thank you.  This weekend was a complete success both firing went very well.   We got a great amount of pottery fired in both firings.  I was so thrilled to see our talented staff  hard at work showing visitor how we fired pottery it the 17 th century it was so impressive to see the two different way of firing pottery.  If you did not get to come to Plimoth Plantation this weekend you missed a great event .  I will post some pictures of the firing so  you can see  how we did it ok.

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Hello Everyone,

I wanted to show you how our mashoon (boat) project is going along.  We started this boat in the end of  May and we were going right along when we got our tree bark to work on the house that was about the first week in June  this has delay the boat project for now.  I blogged about the house project last week go back and read it if you have not.  The way we start to make a boat is by finding a nice big stright tree near a river. There are a lot of good reasons why to fined the tree bye the river like getting the finished boat to the water when you were done burning it out, they are very heavy you don’t want to carry them very far.  Once you find the tree you would use fire to burn it down, you would put clay on the tree about three feet up from the bottom of the tree so the whole tree dose not catch fire.  When the tree weekends and falls down you would burn the end of the tree off and take the bark and any branches off too.  We use fire to hollow the tree by starting a fire on the top of the round log.   We burn all of the wood off till you get to the halfway point of the log, its a little tough in the beginning because the wood falls off the round log and you will have to put it back on the log.  When we get to the halfway point that’s when we wet the sides a lot and keep them wet.  We burn it till the sides are an inch thick and the bottom is 4 to 6 inches thick I can tell how thick the bottom  by feeling the under neath of the log if its warm I will stop burning that should be good.  The bottom is heavy and acts like a natural keel and keep the boat upright.  This whole project it th 17th century would take 5 to 6 days burning 24 hours a day the whole length of the log burning at once.  This boat when its done we hope to donate to Smithsonian museum (The Museum of the American Indian) in Washington here are some more pictures of it now.  We make two of these boats a year one in the spring when we open and one in the fall.

Thanks for reading Please if you have an comment or question please click on the comment below and leave me a message OK.

Tim

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Hello Readers,

He’s Phillip working on our Neeswetu (Two Fire  House) in the Wampanoag home site at Plimoth Plantation.  Phillip is on the roof of the home starting to put the next layer of tree bark (popular Bark) on.  The way we put the bark on is just like shingling the side of a building today, starting at the bottom and overlapping the bark side bye side all the way around the house and then starting the next row on top of that row it over laps the first row bye one two feet .  The bark has to be replaced every three too five years today because of acid rain and chemicals in the air today that gets on the bark and rots it faster.  In the 17th century the bark would of  lasted eight to ten years.  We use saplings to tie the bark tight to the frame, by drilling a hole in the bark and tying the out side saplings to the inside frame  this would sandwiched the bark between two frames.  The roof takes us today at the museum a few weeks to do as we slow the process down to able to show this process to as many visitor as we can.  When the roof is done its done we don’t take it a part and start over trust me it’s a lot of work .  Please come to Plimoth Plantation soon to see this as this roof  is going on fast.    Please leave a comments about my blogs I love the feed back tell me what you like and what you don’t like and I will try to have fun with your comments thanks.  I am going to post some more picture click on the more tag and you can see more pictures.

Tim  Read the rest of this entry »