Ripping Raffle

Oo have we mentioned we're having a Christmas Fayre? Maybe once or twice....

Along with the stalls of lovely things and the choir who will be filling the hall with festive tunes we also have a raffle.

So far the very generous businesses of Frome have donated some lovely things, including:

- a festive quilt top from Millie Moon - stitched in part by the ladies of the WI.

- a gift of knitting which contains needles, yarn and the pattern to knit some gorgeous socks.

- coffee from the Little Red Cafe.

- more craft books than you can shake a stick at.

And there's more!

If you love craft then this is the best raffle ever!

See you on the 6th december from 7.00pm in the United Reformed Church Hall.

The Fabulously Festive Christmas Shopping Fayre

Please save the date in your calender for the Frome WI Fabulously Festive Christmas Shopping Fayre!

If you are interested in being a stall holder, please fill in and return this form by the end of October. 

Contact Sophie Shields for more details.

August meeting pictures

In our August meeting we made jam jar posies with Grace Haskins from Bramble and Wild on Catherine Hill.



First Grace demonstrated how to create a loose, natural looking posy. She started with showing us how to choose and cut the flowers.


Then moved on to gathering the flowers together - a tricky technique (that she made look really easy!) to ensure the stems all twist in the same direction.




The end result was a beautiful, effortless looking posy.




Then it was our turn...








Some ladies brought beautiful flowers from their own gardens.






And Bramble and Wild supplied really beautiful blooms for the less florally fortunate of us to use.

Rose 'Memory Lane'
Lisianthus
Stock
Astrantia
Alchemilla Mollis









By the end of the evening the hall was filled with lovely looking jam jars.










And the cake table was, frankly, spectacular as always.




Thank you to Bramble and Wild for a lovely and very interesting evening. I think we all have a new respect for the art of floristry! And thanks to all the ladies who came, made posies, baked cakes and donated to refreshments.

In September's meeting we will be hosting Marmelade Yarns for stitching and bitching at all levels. More details to follow...

July meeting pictures

As the London 2012 games approach our July meeting featured a talk from professional athlete David Hill. As a swimmer he has won bronze medals in both the world and European championships as well as representing Britain at the 2004 Athens Paralympics.



Credit: Team Bath

The talk was really interesting and amongst other things we learned about life as a professional athlete (hard), how much he has to eat to fuel such activities (lots) and what he plans to do in the future (epic). David was an inspirational speaker who left us all feeling slightly in awe of the dedication required to achieve at such a high level.

If you would like to find out more information about David please visit his Team Bath page, or we can pass on your details if you would like to get in touch.

After David's talk we had a break allowing everyone to try the amazing cheese based baked goodies brought in by our members. There have been lots of requests for recipes so we will post these up as soon as we can.



We also had a table where members could suggest alternative names for our branch. There were lots of ideas and we will collate and share them with you ASAP.

Lastly, Storm and Laura did a demonstration on how to make cake pops.



They are delicious and very easy to make. The recipe has been put on the blog if you would like to have a bash.

Once the demo was over everyone had a go at the final steps of cake pop making - taking the rolled cake balls...



Dipping them in melted chocolate, decorating them and eating them!



Thanks
A huge thank you to David Hill for a brilliant talk - good luck for the future!

Thanks to everyone who brought cheese bakes, drinks or donations. The cake and drinks tables are maintaining a super high.

And thank you to everyone that came on Thursday - it's a pleasure to spend an evening with you!

Next month
In our August meeting we will be hosting a talk from Bramble and Wild on Catherine Hill and they will teach us how to make beautiful jam jar posies.

The meeting is free to members or £3 for visitors.

Please bring your own jam jar and flowers if you are able. If you would like these supplied then there will be a £2 charge.

Please could you let us know - either by email WI.frome@gmail.com or on the Facebook event if you plan on attending and whether you would like us to supply flowers/jam jars?

Cake pops recipe

Cake pops are the new macaroons which were the new cupcakes, or something. Anyway they are super easy to make and very delicious to eat.



Credit: BBC

Here is the recipe for cake pops from our July meeting.

Ingredients:
Cake: this recipe uses 1 chocolate sponge made in a loaf tin, but this could be replaced with any sponge or fruit cake. You can either make a cake or buy a ready made sponge (shh no one will ever know).

Icing: this recipe uses chocolate fudge butter icing but you could use any thick, spreadable icing or frosting. Again you could make your own or buy ready made.

Chocolate, melted: we used white chocolate.

Sticks: we used white chocolate Mikados but you could use lollipop sticks or candy sticks. In fact Mikados turned out to be a bit unsuccessful with warm hands as they snapped so don't use them!

Decoration: sprinkles, sparkles, whatever takes your fancy

Method

1. Bake cake and leave to cool completely. Or take cake out of packaging!

2. Cut crusts off of cake. This will ensure there are no lumps in your finished cake pops.

3. Crumble the sponge into a bowl. The finer the sponge the better. You could use a food processor to do this, your hands or a knife.

4. Add a tablespoon of icing to the sponge crumbs and mix with your hands. Keep adding one spoonful of icing at a time until the mixture comes together in a dough like consistency and forms one large ball. Too little icing and the mixture won't hold together, too much and it will be sloppy. This is a crucial stage!

5. Refrigerate for at least half an hour.

6. Now roll ping pong sized balls of cake mixture and place onto a lined baking sheet.

7. Refrigerate for at least half an hour.

8. Break the white chocolate into an oven proof bowl and put into the microwave on 20 second blasts until melted. Be careful not to over cook or the chocolate will separate.

9. Put a blob of melted chocolate on the end of a stick and push into a cake ball. Do this for each cake ball and leave the chocolate to dry. This will only take a minute or so and the chocolate will act like glue to hold the stick in place.

10. Now dip each cake ball into the melted chocolate ensuring an even coverage. Stand the cake pop upright to dry - you could use a cup, jam jar, floristry oasis, whatever you have to hand.

11. Before the chocolate dries add your decorations. For inspiration google 'cake pops' there are hundreds of pages of inspiration. If in doubt hundreds and thousands look quite nice.

12. Sit back, feel smug at your baking wonder and eat cake pops.

Competition Time - Design the Frome WI Banner!

Many WI groups have banners that they display at public events. As Frome WI is a new branch, we currently don't have a banner, and we thought that it would be fun to design and make one as a group.

The plan is to hold a competition to select the design of the banner. The chosen design will then be made by the branch at a craft-a-long picnic.

Guidelines for the competition are:

• The banner will be mounted on a T-frame (see examples in the links below)
• Maximum size of 1 metre x 1 metre
• The design should be suitable for a group project (eg different parts could be made by different people?)
• Please include brief details of how you imagine it will being constructed
• The committee will pick the top 3 designs
• These will be shown at the July meeting for members to vote on
• All voting will be done blind / by secret ballot
• Deadline - 9th July 2012
• Email designs to  wi.frome@gmail.com
• Contact a member of the committee if you cannot email the design and want to submit it by hand / post

Have fun designing!!

Example photos of WI banners on the internet:

National Needlework Archive

Oxfordshire Federation of Women's Institutes

Polstead Women's Institute

Kent Archaeological Society

Cholesbury and St Leonard Women's Institute

June meeting pictures

On Thursday 21st June we held our latest WI meeting.

Sport and Fashion

We had a talk by Rosemary Harden. Rosemary is curator at the Fashion Museum in Bath where she has worked for over 20 years. Rosemary has organised a number of exhibitions including Women of Style (2000), John Bates Fashion Designer (2006) and The Diana Dresses (2010).

This year the Fashion Museum have an exhibition on Sport and Fashion and Rosemary described how sports clothing has had a significant impact on the world of women's fashion, for example the link between tennis and the mini skirt, and horse riding and the tailored jacket.

(Credit: Fashion Museum)



For more information and to find out about visiting the Fashion Museum to see the current exhibition along with the incredible archive of garments, please visit the website.

Hooks and needles

We spent the rest of the evening in yarn joy, with experts showing novices how to knit and crochet.  Thanks to everyone who brought along yarn, needles and hooks and a special thank you to the lovely lovely people at Future Publishing for providing us with bundles of yarn, hooks, needles and patterns. They have also provided us with a FromeWI special offer on The Making Spot. Woohoo!





A bit of needle felting with Gilly...




Ladies getting stuck in...



























If you would like to join in more regular knit chat online then please join our Ravelry group. We are thinking of setting up some knit alongs/hook alongs for us to craft together from the comfort of our sofas.

If you are interested in meeting up in person to craft then please get in touch either via Facebook or email and we'll set something up.

Thanks and thanks again!

So as always, thanks to everyone who came along. It's such a lovely way to spend an evening - chatting, learning and eating cake.

Thanks to those who brought drinks and a huge thank you to the ladies who baked cakes. The cake standard is AMAZING and I for one look forward to them every month! I only managed to get 2 pictures as they were all gobbled up really quickly!









Next month

The July meeting will take place on Thursday 19th July and will be vaguely Olympics themed.

May meeting

Thanks to everyone who came to our May meeting last night. We had brilliant fun creating some jubilee inspired crafts and watching demonstrations by the very talented ladies from Millie Moon.

Here are some pictures from the meeting. We'll post the minutes separately.










Making corsages...



















Making cards...









The ladies from Millie Moon did demonstrations on...

Tea cosies




Bunting



And patchwork






A properly fab night!

Details of next month's meeting coming soon.