Looking Forward ....

So, having looked back to review a bit of what’s happened in this blog and to me in the year now past, it’s time to look forward to what’s coming up in the new year.

First off, of course, I intend to continue to meet my self-established goal of posting a minimum of twice per week. There will times, I expect, where I will exceed this goal, as I have in the past.

Included in the early posts for the new year will be some of the heraldry that we found while wandering the streets of Florence, Italy, last September. (Well, we figured we’d already spent the money for airfare to go from here to Europe to attend the Congress in Stuttgart; why not take a few days more and play tourist someplace special before coming home. It came down to a choice between Florence and Vienna. Sorry, Vienna! Maybe next time.)

Though probably not traveling quite so far from home as Europe in 2011, I already have several speaking engagements booked. All of them are more or less local (Texas is a pretty large place, so “local” may include a wider area than many think), and I get to talk about heraldry at all of them. (You can find a more complete listing of where I’m and what presentations I’ll be giving on my website at www.appletonstudios.com/Speaker.htm)

And I hope to be able to make the time to work on a couple of new heraldic projects, as well as getting back to work on a couple of others, in the coming year. One new one is intended to be a short article of the changes in depiction of the crest of the Winslow arms over the years. The crest is a tree stump putting forth new branches, and it appears to me that the depiction has gone from an original intent of having the shield of the arms “hang” from the crest by its strap (or gige) to something that eventually became something that looks like a halo or a bicycle inner tube encircling the stump. Weird, huh?

The second new one is a bigger project, an illustrated booklet of the coats of arms along the gallery façade of the exterior of the Church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, along with as much information as I can glean about the armigers whose arms they are. (They don’t let you take photos inside the church, and their tourist booklets focus far more on the art in the church than the heraldry, but I could photograph the gallery that extends along two sides of the exterior, and it’s a pretty impressive collection of arms.)

Among the projects I want to get back to work on is the continuing search for coats of arms with camels on them, in preparation for an update to, or expanded second edition of, my book Camels In Heraldry. (Information on the current edition can be found at www.appletonstudios.com/BooksandGames.htm)

So, that’s some of what I’m looking forward to heraldically in the coming year. I hope you’ve enjoyed your visits here, and I also hope that as you come back to this blog you will continue to find what I write about here to be interesting. Thank you for dropping by, and I look forward to your visits in the coming year.