Where Are My Manners?

Having mentioned the influx of visitors to the site in yesterdays post I neglected to say
HELLO to you all....how rude of me, for which I apologise. I hope that you enjoy the blog and continue to keep track of all the stuff that we do at Hampton Court Palace, feel free to ask questions should the feeling take you, I'll do my best to answer all comments and questions.

More pictures sent to Flikr today, the usual mish mash of stuff from the last cookery event, no 'stand out' images, just the general run of the mill stuff.

The wax fountain has reached a bit of an impasse until the new wax arrives unfortunately. Dave spent most of Saturday and Sunday either gilding the lions on the lower stage, or getting children to do it for him (guess who turned out to do the better job?) whilst Adrian did a lot of chatting to the public and sterling work in keeping the washing up under control. Come Sunday afternoon though, they decided to have a look at their previous handy work, the St George and the Dragon, to see how it was doing. To their surprise it was starting to sag a little due to the weight of the dragon and the mountain base was beginning to collapse.
This was in part due to the technique that they had employed to build it in the first place, out of several individual pieces 'welded' together - in all fairness they were learning as they went and pretty much as soon as they'd finished the mountain they said that they'd much rather have cast it in one piece.

Anyway, long story short.., whilst trying to shore the mountain and dragon up it all began to fall apart, which it turns out gave them the ideal opportunity to do as they had wanted to earlier and cast the mountain in one piece:



as you can see being done in the video.

As it turns out, the new mountain although much stronger than the previous version, was just a touch on the small side:


but at least with this new stable platform they can add to it to improve the look without the fear of it collapsing again too soon..........well that's the theory anyway, only time will tell.

Tomorrow sees me working on the menus for the next cookery weekend along with some more planning for the June weekend, so I should be able to let you all have a sneak preview soon....fingers crossed.