The folks at Brass Goggles would like to wish all our readers a very Happy New Year!

“There is nothing- absolutely nothing- half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.”
That’s what Ratty said to Mole in Kenneth Grahame’s beloved classic, ” The Wind in the Willows”. It gets even better when the boats are those gorgeous steamers that abide at Lake Windermere.

The railroads arrived at Windermere in the 1840s [...]

From Patrick Twyford (aka Wilham de Gray, a boilermaker of the Imperial Engineering Corp.) comes this set of pictures taken on December 19..
“I had the good fortune to be a part of a Steampunk Cruise aboard a restored 1902 Steamship called ‘The Waratah’. It was a truly incredible Steampunk event and we were fortunate enough [...]

From
Dr. van Klausen via email, comes this:
Greetings!
For the first issue of our steampunk story zine “Steampunk Quarterly”, which hopefully will be published in February, we still need more stories.
So we put out an announcement for every steampunk writer out there to send us her or his story. Every story published will be rewarded with $50. [...]

Clockwords is a hectic word game set in Victorian London. You are a genius inventor who discovers plans for a mysterious machine that runs on the power of language. Then your lab is infiltrated by mechanical insects that have come to steal your secrets!
Clockwords

Taking a cue from Her Majesty the Queen,  here is the 1st Annual Brass Goggles Blog Christmas Message, hopefully the start of a tradition here at the blog
This is my first Christmas as the  Brass Goggles  Blog Admin,and I have to say that its been an interesting few months and a learning experience in picking [...]

The company from which Brass Goggles purchases its hosting service has announced that the server we’re on needs a fairly significant hardware repair. In order to accommodate this, our site may have to be taken off-line periodically throughout the day on Saturday, Dec. 26.   These outages should generally be only a few minutes in [...]

A few more Christmas tidbits:
Make some Victorian Ornamentsfrom from juice can lids.

And yet another source for gifts:  Chrononaut Mercantile

Despite the subject matter, I felt this perfectly embodied some key points of the victorian age.
Enjoy! – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHze0SqB5Zg
& for Steampunk in general, this -  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HgejSCHRi8
Update: After a quick search, it looks like these have been mentioned in the forums but I’m including it here for those that only read the blog or have missed the forum [...]

For Day 7,  lets have something a little different. How about a recipe from 1846 for  “A Yorkshire Christmas Pie”?

“First, bone a turkey, a goose, a brace of young pheasants, four partridges, four woodcocks, a dozen snipes, four grouse, and four widgeons; then boil and trim a small York ham and two tongues. Season and [...]