Rosalie Gilbert

I made a Museum treasure hunt!

A few weeks ago I had my official book launch for The Secret Lives of Single Medieval Women at the Abbey Museum of Art & Archaeology, and we had a short speech, lots of scrumptious food and I made this fun Scavenger Hunt for the Museum and Art Gallery for guests to really have a closer look at the displays!

While not all items are medieval, they are all things associated with the life of a single woman!

Here's our item card that I made! Obviously, you can't collect them. It was a find-and-photograph and first one back won a prize!

While not all items are medieval, they are all things associated with the life of a single woman! Writing implements, dress accessories, devotional literature and even the much beloved pet, the small white, fluffy dog! What might a woman do with a monk? Why, confess! (although players had lots of fun suggestions of things to do with monks! naughty! Naughty!)

Here's our item card that I made! Obviously, you can't collect them. It was a find-and-photograph and first one back won a prize!

The hunt itself was extremely successful with players racing around the museum and participants helping each other out with wild waving of arms saying "That way! That way!" and even museum staff dropping clues as to which cases to look in! All in all, much merriment was had, with people reporting that it was a lot more fun than they thought it would be.

The absolute funny part is that one of the items, the buckle and chape, was in a case which was out of display due to some water damage from a recent storm, and since people couldn’t see the exact item I had in mind, they were frantically looking for anything which might have been it. Answers included spotting a buckle on a suit or armour, in a painting, and on the clothes they were wearing themselves!

At the conclusion, there were two back at the same time with everything ticked off, so I decided that a runner up prize was in order and everyone left happy!

I've needed to make a new footer for posts on my Author blog page for the new Medieval Wisdom for Modern Women book, so I did that today keeping in with the general pink theme.

And I've needed to update the other footer to add in the new book at the bottom and add a link to the website for ordering. So that's done too now.

The pre-book things continue getting all the things done for promotions... stickers to go on delivery boxes, new business cards with the cover on, a cute set of promotional bookmarks and a couple of coffee mugs for prize pack giveaways. At this point, it's all Australian posting. I looked into an Amazon release as well but to sell soft covers as actual books, I need to pay them to print them, which is essentially what I'm doing now here in Brisbane.o unless they get picked up by an actual publisher overseas, they'll not be going outside of Australia due to the horrendous postage pricing.

The Rosalie's Medieval Woman Online Shop is in place, upgraded from the other book shopping page, but there's no actual cart yet. People will need to email me with their order and use the PaypalMe function that Paypal has where I request a payment, so much like an invoice. It's better than nothing, and cheaper than an e-commerce business package or Etsy shop because I really don't think I'm going to sell huge quantities. Local bookshops, the museum shop and places which stock my other book are my main sellers anyway, so I feel it's not the end of the world. My son, who is in IT is checking out drop in webshops for me and we may have an affordable solution there. Maybe I need to re-look at Etsy but I think there are monthly fees which may outstrip what I make.

Anyway, busy weekend of getting things ready and getting promotional emails out ready for books to arrive, so they can go into shop Xmas catalogues as sweet little stocking fillers.

Wish me luck!