We did it for Denman!

This is the table at the end of the morning! It was laden down with gorgeous cakes & loads of very diverse and interesting bring & buy bargains!

Our fundraising coffee morning for Denman was a great success! The target was £5 per member, we have 24 members (+ 2 who are intending to join) so we were aiming for £120.
It seemed quite quiet at first, but lots of lovely people came along with contributions - and we raised £145!
How fab is that! Well done everyone and thank you all very much for your support.

A date for your 2012 diary!

Following a very busy e mailing few days we have found a date for many of our members to enjoy meeting for lunch! Beginning on Friday 6th January, possibly at The Duke of Cumberland (although we may indeed revert to The Bell) we shall bring in the New Year in style!

In order to achieve this more that 75% of our members communicated by e mail!

I hope everyone is planning to bring a cake/donation for the bring & buy/a friend and themselves to the coffee morning at Caroline's house on Saturday from 10 until 12 noon! We are looking for another successful event!

Monday 5th December 12 noon - 4 pm is our next craft session at the Memorial Hall (the same day as our Christmas meal). Do come along!

Catch up....

Caroline, Jackie and I spent a very enjoyable and productive day working on our crafts on Saturday! I'll let you know as soon as we have chosen our next date!

Gill Baker has given us a lovely thank you card for her gift. (She was unable to attend the AGM and receive it in person, so I called round to her house with it). The choice of Christmas cactus was a perfect one for her, as she had been admiring a friend's only a few days before!

The Christmas Carol Concert programme is almost ready to go into production - we need to have an idea how many of our WI members and families will be coming along - please let me know! ('phone or e mail, or even a comment on the blog!)

I hope you are all able to find something for Barbara's 'Bathroom' stall at the Church Christmas Fair on 2nd December? I have a huge bottle of pink bubble bath to donate and a very pretty little cloth bag which will be perfect to hold.... something or another. I'm sure it will be just right for someone!

Just in case you were wondering about our AGM, here is the WIFTA awarded to all of us! (for a bit of fun!) It's the Women's Institute Fabulous Team Award.

Please come along to Caroline's house next Saturday morning for our 'Do it for Denman' coffee morning. We really need to raise £120 (£5 for each of our members) bring friends, cash to spend, cakes and items for others to buy... can we do it? Yes we can!

Craft Day

Yesterday I went to Pitney village hall (near Somerton) for a 'Patchwork Christmas craft' workshop.

It was excellent! I spent the day with some lovely ladies, one from Binegar and another from Yeovil. The tutors were all so patient, experienced and encouraging! This is what I made - unfortunately I didn't mange to make everything which was available - so pehaps I should get a place on the next one! We really appreciated the hours and hours spent beforehand by the tutors in creating all of the individual kits for each of us - all we had to do was assemble each item according to the instructions - and what festive results!
This day cost only £12 and included tea and coffee throughout the day, kindly provided by the ladies of Pitney WI. The County Federation craft committee certainly came up trumps!

"Luck be the Lady Tonight!"

 



Six lucky WI ladies had a wonderful, winning evening at the Owl Babies fundraising bingo last night! The Owl Babies pre school committee had clearly worked very hard to gather some fabulous prizes and put on a really fun event.

 



We all sat together around one table... and the novices amongst us received instructions on how to do it! I was armed with Beginner's Luck (which, you will be pleased to note, I shared!) and a professional 'Bingo Dabber' in bright pink (bought for me especially by my lovely husband!). In addition we had June B on our table, who told us that she is lucky.



Tension mounts as the two 'full house' winners draw for the M&S voucher!

Unbearable tension! Who will draw the highest card to decide the winner of the cash prize?



The lucky pink bingo dabber and our cache of prizes! June was right - she did bring us loads of luck!

  



Shepton Mallet Carnival!

Yes! We did it! Four intrepid Leigh on Mendip WI members partied all evening in the streets of Shepton Mallet! There were 9 WI ladies altogether, from Binegar, Milborne Port & County.
Our music was superb! Pretty Woman, Dancing in the Street, Cecelia and many more great foot tapping tracks! We danced and sang all the way round the route, twirling our umbrellas while the crowds were smiling, waving and laughing! It was a great success!

The WI is officially FUN!

Thank you to the Binegar team for our warm green wigs, glow sticks and to the WI for our brollies and the fluorescent wrist and ankle bands. (Also thank you to Binegar WI for the photo!)
Oh dear, did we really wear that? !

Somerset County Federation of W.I. - Annual Meeting in Yeovil

Saturday 29th October saw Yvonne, Barbara and me in Yeovil for the Somerset County Federation Annual Meeting. It was an excellent day! Lots of stalls to browse, plenty of information to glean and I don't know how many WI members! We applauded and marvelled at the anniversaries to be celebrated next year by various Somerset WIs: from 60 years right up to 95 years! One of the ladies who went up to receive the certificate had joined when she was 14!

We heard about the work of our Somerset committees, including a very moving poem read out by Eileen Hurd (Public Affairs and International committee) about the lady who has to collect water every day for her family. The new project for ACWW being 'Water for All'. The focus for next year, in addition to the farming debate, is how to secure safety for children using the internet.

There will be plenty of craft workshops organised by Shelia Budd and her committee including felt making and sugarcraft as well as some more 'dabble days' which have been very popular. There will also be a national competition to create a WI heirloom.

Marie Masters from the Music and Drama committee encouraged us all to take part in the singing for fun day which will be for any ability and any age on 28th April at Chilthorne Domer. It will really be lots of fun!

How does the WI inspire women? Well, we listened to the cover model from a recent WI Life magazine - the woman who had attended a hat making session at her local WI, only to discover a talent and a passion for hat making, which otherwise would have remained hidden. She now works one day a week in London for a famous milliner and has begun her own very promising business.

Our guest speaker, Sarah Raven was fascinating! Her description of a career change from medicine to growing flowers commercially was inspiring! Anything is possible! She went on to show us beautiful slides of the favourite flowers she grows and then finished by demonstrating how to use a sieve, some fillers, a bride and some gatecrashers to create a gorgeous flower arrangement! Intruiging! It all looked so easy!  

Maggie Symonds, a former Somerset WI member who now lives in Wiltshire and is a member of the National Federation of WIs told us about some of the things in store for us: there are action packs for crafts we can hire (incidentally, I looked on the WI website to see that we could hire one on how to make paper beads.... and then when we visited Radstock museum last night I noticed a womens magazine from 1923 with an article on how to make paper beads!). There will be grants available for new gardening projects, training for 'Let's Cook' tutors, a 'Sing for Joy' initiative and a "Big Walk, Little Splash" which will take place from 1st April - 16th September and we will be required to cover 209 miles. (that figure was significant, 'though I'm afraid I can't remember quite why!) 

Margaret Bigg, from the membership Support committee, explained the plans to amalgamate the AGM and the Resolutions meetings into the May meeting for all Somerset WIs, with effect from May 2013 This means that whoever is elected on the committee in November 2012 will serve only until May 2013! 

It was most enjoyable, and in very pleasant company!

P.S. Wednesday, I read in a magazine, the following paragraph:

Singing brings a whole host of health and emotional benefits. Even in 10 minutes filling your lungs and singing along to a few Christmas songs in the car on the way to work can put you in a good mood for the day. Singing not only raises self-confidence, experts also believe it can boost the immune system by lowering stress levels, and all that deep breathing helps us take in more oxygen, which releases muscle tension. That has got to be a good thing....

WI leading the field again, then!