Hours in the Community

On Saturday I volunteered at the local Christmas Tree festival cooking bacon baps and hot dogs for the locals along with two others from 1st Watchet Rainbows. The church where the trees were displayed presented over 50 decorated trees, each one made by a different local club, school or social group.

This was an amazing event; it was great to see people of all ages coming up to view the different trees and bonding over a cuppa and a roll. It was only made even more impressive by seeing how the electrician had wired all the tree lights on some very old church electrics!

Attached is an image of our tree (1st Watchet Rainbows). We made the characters over two weeks, the first week we spent making the Gingerbread men out of salt dough and decorated them the following week with all the odds out of my craft supply.

Now to the cooking, well what can I say but we never expected such a rush on food! We were told to cater for about 100 bacon rolls and 30 hotdogs, which is what they usually sell.

The event ran from 9am to 4pm. We started cooking at 10am and was scheduled to cook until 3pm, however, the food was so popular this year we had sold out by 12 o’clock leaving us with hungry customers! A volunteer went off to top us up with more supplies only to last another 1.5hrs leaving us out of food at 1.30pm! I have never cooked so much bacon in my life!!!  

It was finished off with some great live music provided by local musicians and I am pleased to say our food stall raised just over £370. As the event was organised by the church and 1st Watchet Rainbows the money was then divided between both organisations.

…

For those of you who’ve not yet checked out these new Colart Academy lessons on dealing with stress, here’s my review.

The lessons are short so you can fit one in, in-between a meeting or during breakfast, lunch, etc.  For anyone who has been involved in a meditation/mindfulness practice, they offer useful reminders and for those unfamiliar with such, they provide a nice, entry level starting point for better understanding the signals of stress and instituting mechanisms for coping.

Go into these lessons with an open mind and enjoy. 

…

first of all many thanks  to Gregory & Vincent for their professionalism and their enthousiasm. LUCAS (belgium customer with 14 stores) was very impressed by the dynamism of the factory and the fact that it is investing towards a bright future, and they suggested that this could also translate to all of our brands

…

So, here is some profitable sustainability and agility in action…..We have had, for many years, discontinued Artist Loft Charcoal (Michaels private label)……as Bruno often reminds me!! We got \’stuck\’ with this between buyer and range changes at Michaels. Fast forward to today – our Charcoal supplier in North America cannot supply some of our charcoal anymore – and we are out of stock with no new supplier on board yet. So, thank you to @John Mendryk and @Carlos Trejo, and teams, for managing to secure W&N packaging and next week we will start repacking over 2,500 discontinued packs of Artist Loft Charcoal in DC4 to W&N (it\’s the same product and 100% provisioned too). This will put W&N Hard Vine Charcoal 3 pack back into stock for 6 months and we will sell for around $3,500 :-). The small things can help make the difference!

…