Several groups from Stanwell WI attended the Middlesex Annual meeting via Zoom.
We enjoyed the great speakers and a very uplifting speech from Ann Jones.
President Mary Jeffery, Treasurer Angela Chessman and committee member Maureen Stone had the luxury of cooling off in President Mary Jeffery’s pool (lucky Mary!) after listening to the annual meeting on an extremely hot days.
West Hampstead WI enjoyed a walk in Green Park at the end of July and enjoyed the extraordinary exhibition made up of over 100 life sized elephant sculptures.
Staged by CoExistence, the herd had been exhibited all over London and had come back together for the final week.
Fashioned from Lantana—an invasive weed that devastates crops—the elephants were crafted by villages across India.
For more on this interesting project visit the CoExistence website:
https://coexistence.org/
In July, West Drayton WI members were all invited to a tea party to celebrate the birthday of NHS. It was held in the garden of one of the members, and we enjoyed prosecco and soft drinks followed by homemade cakes and tea served in china cups and saucers. There was a quiz to identify plants in the garden and we coloured in cards to send to NHS workers we felt had helped us in the last year. Everyone thoroughly enjoyed meeting and chatting and a good afternoon was had by all!
Back in lockdown in the spring, our gardening ‘expert’, Liz Morrell, had the great idea that we could all have a go at growing potatoes.
Most of us had never done it before, but by this stage of the many lockdowns, we were ready for anything new!
Liz ‘chitted’ the seed potatoes ready for us and then we all collected a few with a small amount of chicken manure (very smelly, but the magic ingredient, we were assured!).
We planted them in any container we had, and as the leaves appeared, we kept covering them in more soil, adding the manure after 4 or 5 weeks.
My haul was about 2.5lbs (1 kg), but others had 6 or 7 lbs (around 3kg)and it’s definitely on my list to do again next year. Nothing beats the taste of freshly dug new potatoes, cooked with a bit of garden mint.
We take Cow Byre Exhibition space on the Manor Farm Complex in Ruislip on an annual basis and… we’re back in 2021!
Our exhibition will be held from 15-20 August and everyone’s welcome to come and browse our handiwork and view demonstrations.
The 2020 exhibition was cancelled due to Covid-19 however we are back here exhibiting in 2021.
You can find the Manor Farm Complex on Pinn Way in Ruislip, HA4 7QL: come and say hello!
Congratulations to the winners of our enhanced July 200+ Club draw!
Helen Eales, Greenford
2nd prize – £40
Jean Bicknell, Manor Farm
3rd prize – £30
Gwen Hayward, West Drayton
Interested in joining?
Keep your eye out in your email for the application form for the next 200+ Club year. Applications close 30 September!
It was a very long 518 days between meetings but we were delighted to get back into the Community Centre for our July meeting. We were thrilled to have 20 members attending our first night back and even more excited to meet some of our members for the first time in person as they joined during lockdown and we’ve only met them on Zoom before. As one of them put it ‘it’s like meeting people off the telly!’
We had planned to have a speaker from our chosen charity, St Mungo’s Ealing, to tell us about the work they do to support rough sleepers in our community but unfortunately our speaker was pinged by the Covid app. However, we luckily foresaw this possibility and had a back up of a game of People Bingo where members were given bingo cards and had to find someone who was born in another country or was wearing patterned socks or has been to Denman College. It was a lovely opportunity for members to chat and get to know each other.
We were taking it easy in our first meeting, skipping some of our usual activities until we get back into the swing of things. As such, we didn’t sing Jerusalem (although we watched a video of it being sung at the 2015 Annual Meeting) or have a raffle. We did however have cake and we were delighted that our members rose to the occasion with their cake contributions!
Sixteen members met for (hopefully) the last time in the Bandstand suitably decorated with colourful pompoms (and Penny Shervill matching with her Pom Pom sun hat!) Wendy Capehorn’s beautifully knitted Hayes Town WI bunting.
After Jerusalem and WI business , I passed some Quality Street around, but not to be eaten yet, rather each colour wrapper represented a subject members had to talk about from my list: travel, sport, and so on.
The funniest one came from Jo Johnson who announced she was a Happy Hooker to shrieks of laughter: her subject had been hobbies & her passion is… crocheting!
As it will be her and Marion Batchelor’s birthdays next week ,we stopped for yummy cakes and of course sang Happy Birthday.
Everyone is looking forward to meeting up again on 19th August in our community centre.
Two of our committee members took things to the extreme to get their exercise during lockdown by playing socially distanced badminton over their garden fence. The problem was they couldn’t see when the shuttlecock was on its way back over!
But now that things are a little more back to normal we were able to have our first meeting in July in our President’s garden.
After the catch-up on news and official business had been completed, we were able to plan our next meetings and even a day out. This was followed by more catching up, sandwiches, cake, tea, maybe a little prosecco and a raffle to complete a lovely afternoon together.
A collaboration project between Chelsea College of Art and the WI offered an opportunity for members Maralyn, Clare and Alison to show their creativeness and share skills with the college students. Maralyn cleverly worked with the similarity in appearance between a section through an apple and a woman’s reproductive organs to promote ‘5 Minutes that Matter’ Cervical Smear Awareness: ‘If an Apple a Day Keeps the Doctor Away, then 5 Minutes Can Save Your Life’.
Shocked to learn that women avoid smear tests through fear they don’t look ‘right’ she used the idea of a decorated ‘lady garden’ as her basis.
Clare, like many, feeling isolated during the lockdown created a quilt, which was also a letter to her sister in Australia. She used scraps of material from garments that had meaning to them both, inspired by letters between sisters in Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple.
The quilt embodied our resolution Link Together to Alleviate Loneliness.
Alison used ‘No More Violence Against Women’ as her message, creating a banner formed of separate panels which incorporated many different sewing techniques. She chose a banner as it has the power to stop people in their tracks and make them think.
What talented women!
Middlesex News for August 2021 is out. Our WIs have started meeting in person again, taking advantage of the summer weather when it has played ball! It’s wonderful to see everyone getting together after so very long.
Click here to read the newsletter.
