The other day I realized it had been quite a while since my last post so I thought it was time to sit down and talk a bit more. Lately this blog has drifted away from what I had originally been hoping to base it around which was an inside look into the work undertaken in collections management. The reason for this is that the museum has been pursuing several different community events that have taken up most, if not all, the museum staff's time over the last month or so. During this time we have put on several farmers markets along with our annual summer kids day called Panther Valley Day, which had to compete with many other community events this year. The farmers market and Panther Valley Day took a lot of planning and work to organize like ensuring we had all the right equipment for the children's activities. This work which ranged from getting tents donated to calling local bands to preform at our event took a great deal of time and really brought into perspective how much work goes into organizing and pulling off an event such as this. In the end all the work paid off and we had all the volunteers, goods, entertainment and activities we needed to create a successful event.
Thankfully now with  Panther Valley Day out of the way and the Farmers market becoming a weekly routine we can get back to business as usual at the museum. This means I'll be attempting to complete a grant application that gets the museum the funding to recreate their entire exhibit. In addition to this I will be able to continue working to update our collection's database while maintaining the museum's collection. In other words I will be able to get back to my regular posts about the interesting items I find while working in the back and share them with you. Also if the grant is a success I will hopefully be able to continue working at the museum over the fall and possibly winter helping to update our exhibits with the knowledge of what our collection could support.

Last night was our first ever farmers market here at the museum. The event was a huge success with approximately 750 people attending. Our vendors included everything from freshly cut flowers, home made sausages, fresh locally grown vegetables, locally made chutneys and other delicacies like kale chips, a blacksmith, local coffee vendors, fresh fire oven cooked pizza, fresh fish, artisans, awesome old cars and live music playing nicely in the background. This live music accompanied by the smells of fresh food and flowers surrounded by the historical setting of our museum grounds resulted in the perfect atmosphere for our market.

The event was such a success that many of the vendors sold out of numerous items. Due to this success most if not all of our current vendors have signed up to return next week, or for the entire summer. On top of that numerous other vendors have asked to attend next week's market to see if we can repeat our success. So we encourage everyone to come out next Friday the 18th between 5 and 8pm so we can have an even bigger and better market!

So we've had a very exciting couple weeks here at the museum. Unfortunately it hasn't all been fun. About two weeks ago we had a break in. During this break in several of our display cases were badly damaged, several artifacts were stolen and our front door broken.

These actions were a real wake up call for all of us at the museum and has led to us taking several measures to tighten security around the museum. We are also hopeful that this recent burglary will aid us with our grant applications. Some of the grants we are planning on/in the process of applying to will not only help us purchase better security measures and also allow us to upgrade much of the outdated lighting and display cases along with several other projects planned for the museum.

In addition this break in forced us to rebuild several of the displays and move around/tweak some of the existing exhibits in the museum. The hats I wrote about a few blog posts ago have been put out on display and are looking absolutely fabulous in their new home.

One of the other displays that was broken into also has been remade into an exhibit based around a woman's carrying case from 1886 and is complete with all the make-up bottles, brushes and other accessories.

In all everything is starting to get back to normal here at the museum and we are excitedly looking forward to our first ever farmers market on the 11th of July.