A midwinter Georgian dinner
It’s winter here in New Zealand, and cold and dark and windy and rainy. My local historical costuming friends and I decided to brighten up the shortest (ish) day of the year, and have a Georgian dinner.
It’s winter here in New Zealand, and cold and dark and windy and rainy. My local historical costuming friends and I decided to brighten up the shortest (ish) day of the year, and have a Georgian dinner.
Continuing on with my series of Wellington places named after people with extremely…complicated…histories and legacies, today I’m going to talk about William Wakefield, city founder, coloniser*, kidnapper and someone who was totally willing to be a rape accomplice, and his brother Edward, also hugely influential in founding Wellington, even more of a coloniser, even more of a kidnapper, and probably a rapist. The Wakefields in Wellington Unlike the Sir Truby King Gardens, which are quite hidden and which took my years to discover (and some Wellingtonians never do), it’s hard to miss to miss the Wellington places named after William Wakefield and Edward Gibbon Wakefield. Wakefield Street is a main thoroughfare running through the city. If you’re travelling from the airport to the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, the train station, parliament, or anything government based, you’re almost certainly going to go along Wakefield St. And if you go the other route to get through Wellington, you’ll pass through the Mt Victoria Tunnel**, and come out facing the Basin Reserve, and the Wakefield …
For the past few months I’ve been part of the Wellington Sewing Bloggers group. I don’t do most of their challenges, because when they make patterns they have names like Tiramisu and Renfrew, and when I make patterns they have names like Excella and Anne Adams. They are wonderful women though, and one challenge/get together I was definitely in for (well, I had to be, it was my idea!) was a Craft Crawl of Wellington’s sewing and crafty goodness, using the wonderful Craft & Textile Lover’s Guide to Wellington that Maryanne of Made on Marion designed as a guide. A Craft Crawl is like a pub crawl but way prettier, in every possible way, and just as with a pub crawl, we crossed off the locations on the map as we did them. On this Saturday we concentrated on the outer-suburb craft locations. There are actually over 20 Wellington Sewing Bloggers, but it was just Zara of Off-Grid Chic (who has a sewing cat almost as delightful as Felicity, and makes amazing detailed garments), …