A year ago, Kerstin and I had just built our website and made a project plan for Augusta’s Journey. We had no idea what a cool year we were going to have!
We started by independently doing research and making 1850s outfits. In March we made short trips to visit Augusta’s surroundings and long overdue trips to visit relatives. With summer dresses and bonnets finished, we embarked on our first leg of Augusta’s Journey: a 4-day cruise on Göta Canal.
It was the most memorable journey!
New friends and followers invited us to other events like the Great Crinoline Day in Linköping and a book release party in Stockholm. But as we were planning our German trip in October, we couldn’t just use our summer dresses. We needed to start making wool dresses and silk ball gowns. And we needed to figure out how we were going to travel around in Germany. That took the best part of August and September.
In October, we finally took off for Germany – to follow Augusta’s travels with her diary as a guide book. And that was amazing! To go to the same museums, cathedrals, and national parks and discover what she described in 1847. During this trip we made so many new friends, some of which are include in our Happy New Year card.
Once home again, and with the days getting shorter, we decided to visit other outdoor museums and parks that Augusta wrote about. We spent a memorable evening at Torekällberget in Södertälje, with a single kerosene lamp lighting the room. At Skansen’s Christmas Market, we learned about the Christmas food that was served in the 1800s.
And at our walk around Djurgården, a large park in Stockholm where Augusta also strolled with friends, we ran into Maj Wechselmann, a Swedish film maker who wondered if there were more people like us – that is, others who make their own historical clothes. She is filming a documentary in Augusta’s home town of Norrköping on New Year’s Eve and needed extras with outfits suitable for New Year’s Eve, 1899. Augusta’s daughter Gerda would have been 45 years old at that time, and our outfits for 1850 would be all wrong. So Kerstin jumped on the opportunity to make new outfits for herself and her husband Leif. Tonight, they and some of our Facebook friends will celebrate the New Year in a film production. A fitting finale of Augusta’s Journey 2017.
What are our plans for 2018? Both of us are starting to write about our journey. We hope to publish one book each. And while working on that, we will continue blogging about our discoveries and posting pictures
Thank you for following our journey.
We wish you all a Happy New Year!