Living Museums!!

We love going to open-air, or living, museums. One our favorites is Hancock Shaker Village in the Berkshires. We love being able to see and walk through the actual buildings that people have lived in, touch the actual tools people used, and see trained crafts-people employing the techniques and tools people used so long ago. We're always struck by the ways things haven't changed, and by the many ways in which we can learn from traditional techniques and technologies. Here in Sweden we had the pleasure of going to two open-air museums- one in Stockholm, called Skansen, the other here in Gotland, called Bunge Museum.

Skansen is by far the best and largest open-air museum we have ever visited. One of our favoirte cottages found in Skansen is pictured at the beginning of this post. The Bunge museum had an impressive array of old tools which, of course, we were very exicted about. We wanted to show some of the amazing old spinning tools we saw at Bunge Museum (seen both above and below), many of them not so different from the ones used for Sourced Material: Wool.