Disagården – a 19th century village Part 1

I visited Uppsala, a town north of Stockholm this Saturday. My two oldest kids were on a live roleplaying event for kids outside Uppsala and I had the day off. After a visit to the local gaming shops I went to Gamla Uppsala, or Old Uppsala, a religious and political center of old. I took a stroll around the burial mounds and then went to Disagården, a village made of buildings from the 16th^th to 19^th century.

Burial mounds from the 6^th century

Map of Disagården

The buildings in this fabulous outdoors museum comes from the surroundings of Uppsala and was collected and moved to this place in the thirties. Now it is portrayed as three farms of a village.

From a gamers’ perspective the visit gave me a lot of inspiration for future scratch-building of both historical and fantasy-buildings and equipment.

First the smithy (22 on the map), built in the latter part of the 19^th century. Due to the danger of fire it was situated well away from the main buildings. I didn’t get a picture of the exterior unfortunately, but interior shots.

Small wind-mill (21), used for house-hold milling of grain.

Pigsty (11) from early 19^th century, and combined sty (for fattening the pigs) and loo (10) also early 19th century, and a nice wagon.

Close-up of the reed roof.

And the loo

To be continued.

Book review: Dardanelles patrol

By Peter Shankland and Anthony Hunter, 1964

A book I got from my father, who is interested in military history, just like me, but more towards the navy side. I was rather skeptical about this book, to say the least, but I gave it a try. I was pleasantly surprised.
This is about the British submarine E-11 that breached the Dardanelles during the Gallipoli campaign  in 1915. I had read about this submarine fleetingly, so I knew it existed, but that was about it.
We meet the crew on the journey into the Mediterranean, and travel with them through the Dardanelles and into the Sea of Marmara, where they see a lot of action. Really interesting about a rather unknown part of WWI.
The book reads like a novel, and hard to put down once you start reading. Highly recommended.
With Bookfinder you can find a lot of second-hand copies of this book if you’re interested.

T-26 by Frontline

First a quick view of my workspace. Crammed with paints, models, miniatures, modeling equipment and a computer. I’m working with the T-26:es shown below, a couple of Pz 38(t), some Italian 6 mm, a bunch of familiars for D&D, some odd fantasy figures and the blasted old GW giant (which I never get done), 20mm British 2-pounder that are waiting for me to mix paint for them, the infamous Finnish 37mm Bofors awaiting more cloth and some modern zombies. I’ll try to get everything on the table painted before I start another project. Maybe… probably not…

Well, first off the table are the three Frontline T-26:es we are to use in a participation game on Stockholm Spelkonvent.

They were painted with Vallejo 892 Olive Yellow and given a wash with Citadel Badab Black. Weathering with assorted Vallejo pigments.
The models were a bit of a pain to clean, they are made of resin, and rather crude. Had to fiddle with them quite a lot to get the turrets to fit. But they are relatively cheap, easy to assemble (four parts) and the result is OK.

They will be supported by this monster, a T-28 by SHQ. A lovely model I made last year.