This topic contains 26 replies, has 5 voices, and was last updated by 
beattie 10 years, 4 months ago.
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All sounds very good Masterclock ….. Are you making more kits due to another booking perhaps?
Oh, yes, Sazzie, possibly more than one!
I’ve been working on a detailed report – Masterclock recommended splitting it up so you don’t get the “Great Wall of Text” effect.
Part one coming shortly 😀Glad it went well Masterclock. I’m wondering if you were able to make a royal link with the Duchy?
Part one
All together now!
“Didn’t we have a loverly time the weekend we went to Padstow!”We arrived on Thursday afternoon and set up the morsbags stand in “our” corner of the food tent. This year the committee had treated the food sellers to a lovely new shiny tent, bigger than last year, and we were pleased to hear that it was fully booked – no need for us to expand into an unsold space!
Some of the stall holders were people and businesses we’ve met before and others were new to us. A few samples –
Cornish Olives
a lady from our village selling chocolate
and Katie’s Cornish Hot Pots – more about her later. We were next to some lovely people from Chough Bakery in Padstow (as seen on TV), and there were several others.
Masterclock had taken his Land Rover fire engine and the camping area by the food tent was chock-a-block, so we took our caravan to the far end of another field and set up home next to the “tractor-boys”.
Friday turned out rather showery but we were snug and dry in our swish marquee, until M/C discovered that there was a leak, landing exactly on our Royal Bag on display. All the others were fine! As he said earlier, it must have been a republican tent.
We sewed while we talked to customers in the food tent and gave away the bags we’d prepared earlier. The patriotic lady on the right waited patiently while I finished off her Union Jack bag.
The flag side had originally been a bandanna (according to its label). There were other designs too. The lady on the olive stall picked out a pretty flowery bag for her daughter who was coming to help the next day. When the daughter arrived she swapped it for the one and only “skulls” design instead!! We laughed about the difference between how her mum sees her and how she sees herself! The daughter told us she’s a psychologist….. 😀
Poor Masterclock found himself umpiring a match between his sewing machine and a reel of thread. It took a lot of time to get a result, but in the end the sewing machine won and the thread was shredded.
I talked to a lady called Lucy who was there with her young daughter. Turned out Lucy was the prime mover of “Untrashed Cornwall”
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Untrashed-Cornwall/315079378617321Hey, look, I’m on her facebook page!! Lydia’s watching me sew 😀
I hope to get an invitation to speak to her group in a couple of months.
She introduced me to Laurence Reed, one of the presenters on Radio Cornwall. Unfortunately, he’d just gone off air, but I recorded a piece about morsbags for him to use later. Then he found that it hadn’t recorded after all, so I had to do it again, but not so well!! Never mind! I did make a boo-boo though – I got the year that morsbags was started wrong – by a whole decade!! Now I KNOW I’m getting old!! LOL!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p001d7nfWe had booked dinner in the pop-up restaurant on site and Friday was steak night. Yummy! There was a veggie alternative as well, but M/C commented that it was disconcerting having cooked and raw tomatoes on the same plate. I pointed out that we also had cooked onion rings and raw onions in the salad. If you could balance it on a plate with a steak, it was there! It was also “bucket of ice cream for dessert” night! The sundaes we ordered were ENORMOUS!!! They must have been over a foot high – loaded with chocolate, raspberries, sauce, you name it. We had to walk round all the fields – several of them – before we dared retire to our caravan.
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This reply was modified 10 years, 4 months ago by beattie.
Part two – Saturday
Saturday dawned clear and bright and we had a super sunny day with lots of punters. We’d allocated more bags to Saturday than either of the other days – just as well!! 😀
That morning a lady bounced in from the craft tent next door. We’d bagged her friends and she got the message! She also organises the craft tent for the Boconnoc Steam Fair in a fortnight’s time – would we like to attend??
http://www.lsvc.org/Well, of course we would!! Only thing is, we would have very little stock to give away as we were busy handing it all out here and now. No problem, we’ll do a basic make and take workshop using handcranks as they generate so much interest (and work in tents), and concentrate on talking to people. This plan has the advantage of not putting noses out of joint on people who’ve paid for a stall to sell bags from! So guess where we’ll be in a week and a half or so?
Our food tent was a great place to spend time, and a super spot to catch people who’ve just realised they need a bag. This year there was a music stage on the other side of ‘The Cake Hole’ – our snack spot of choice (this year’s chocolate brownie with salted caramel topping was mmmmmmmm – I’m lost for words!)
Best band of the weekend IMHO was (and I don’t think I quite heard the title correctly) the soul band of the Salamanca Band and Bugles of the Rifle Brigade
https://www.facebook.com/SalamancaBand
Wow, that girl can sing! and the band are great musicians! On Saturday they played in uniform, on Sunday they paid 50p each and played in mufti. 😀
There were some great places selling food – as well as all the burgers and chips anyone could need. Opposite us in the food tent was Katie’s Cornish Hot Pots.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/28356801@N08/14593715362/
The stews looked delicious, but unfortunately we’d got stuff for a packed lunch on Friday. On Saturday though, I had my first taste of goat curry – a Jamaican classic that Katie said she’d learned to cook from her boyfriend.
Do you like the cool disposable, compostable container?
I took it outside where the steam engines were lining up
Part three – Sunday
On Sunday the weather forecast had warned us to expect showers – and we got a heavy one as we were having breakfast. Luckily the last few drops fell as I walked up the fields to the food tent while M/C sorted out the caravan and his Land Rover – and that was the last rain of the day until after we arrived home! 😀 Every half hour or so it would come over dark and threatening but we were so lucky. Any rain must have fallen on someone else – and between the “threats” it got positively hot!
On unpacking the last megabag of morsbags I found that at least half of them were made from a huge batch of Skopos printed with a bamboo pattern! Nice bags and quite a popular design, but we felt like a couple of pandas, surrounded by them all 😀
Other entertainment – The Exmoor Shanty Men
and Elfic the clown/juggler
Daily at 2.30 everything stopped for an aerobatics display. The photos don’t capture the amazing things the pilot did with the plane – making it climb straight up, turning end over end?? Corkscrew twists and falls? The smoke gives some idea of where the plane has recently been.
A little before the show closed I met the owner of a new glamping and crafts site.You can see where this is going, can’t you? Tanya owns Coastal Valley Camp & Crafts
http://www.coastalvalley.co.uk/crafts.html
“How much do we charge to do a workshop?” Well as it’s morsbags the answer has to be “Nothing!” 😀I’ll see if we can work out an arrangement – I don’t want to be used as a free kid-sitting service so there will have to be a minimum age, plus every child accompanied by an adult – all the time!!.
Still, coming away from the rally with three possible new outlets for morsbags and three new pools of people with ears to be bent seems pretty good to me. 😀
Great moments –
* Lucy from Untrashed Cornwall’s instant enthusiasm for morsbags.
* The identical twins from (I forget where, was it Suffolk?) who were talking of setting up their own podJaw dropping moment – when someone wanted one of the smaller bags – to keep her plastic carriers in!! I suppose at least she’s reusing them, but I said the thought of her using a morsbag for that would make me cry and I wouldn’t let her have it!
A photographer from the beeb seems to have visited on Saturday too –
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cornwall-28178222PS, Offcuts, the eagles and vultures man wasn’t there this year 🙁
It did mean that I spent longer sewing and talking morsbags though, so it’s not ALL bad!Now back to making kits for Boconnoc!
Brilliant write up and photos, Beattie. Sounds good fun,friendly and lovely foodie!. Re draw dropping moment, I would have swapped her plastic bags for 10 morsbags to give her a jaw dropping moment!!
About the bag sellers, I always find their bags have long handles and that is the difference. We always go round and chat them up saying yours has linings and zips and pockets and made out of new fabric. So far it has worked. An we never tell anyone we have a free stall. Thats no one else’s business. In fact most of the organisers ask us not to tell anyone.
What a brilliant summary of what looks to have been a brilliant weekend. I so wish I had been there – but we were busy feeding spotty Harry to the tigers at Dartmoor Zoo !!
Love the pictures – you looked a bit bamboozled in one !!
Thanks for sharing
I can’t find one with Beattie in it?!
M/C’s looking bamboozled (groan, Ivybags), I’m the one taking the photos, so there aren’t any of me – except the one on Untrashed Cornwall’s facebook page.
Sorry Harry’s still spotty, but it sounds as if he’s not letting a bit of chicken pox get him down!
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This reply was modified 10 years, 4 months ago by
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