I’ve just had an amazing weekend at Tea & Tents, it’s a camping and crafting weekend originally organised on the unofficial WI facebook page. There were 570 WI ladies at Walesby Scout camp in Nottinghamshire from all over England and Wales. It’s a fantastic place to make new friends, meet old friends and learn new skills…and laugh and chat!

Everything from organising to workshops is done by volunteers. You could do candle-making, knit a poppy brooch, circus skills, recorders, papercraft, zumba, cheerleader, yoga…there were talks too on menopause, top ten happy hacks, WI in prisons…there was a book club, bake off competition, sewing bee competition, T&T got talents, quiz…

First workshop I went on was making a flower crown, all ages can get away with wearing a flower crown at T&T 🙂 I decided to tie mine round my sunhat, it did look pretty!

I made a cute bird brooch, we could use felt or tweed, I rather liked the tweed effect and I found a gorgeous length of tiny ivory flower trim which I used to titivate my bird. I originally used a white felt for the underwing, but I decided to change it for red to make it pop!

Saturday 5pm was market place. There were about 35 of us selling things. I made quite a few tote bags, I showed you the VW campervan ones earlier, I also made dog and cat ones. I made some pocket tissue pouches and some covered notebooks.

I raided my box of things I’d made and never used such as pincushions, lavender bags, more tote bags, childs dress…I also took a pile of fabric, fat quarters I’d been given over the years, furnishing weight remnants etc I had a pretty successful time, I confess to setting my prices fairly low, mainly because I just wanted to get something back on fabric I’d already bought years before.

It was interesting to see what went first and what didn’t sell…the VW stuff, as predicted, sold out first, four bags and two notebooks. All but one of the notebooks sold but I didn’t sell a single tissue pouch. I sold the satchel I made earlier in the year, it was the one item I put a decent price on, there was a lot of hardwear and fabric in it so I wanted to at least recoup my costs. The lady who bought it was so delighted with it and so excited I was happy to sell it to her.

On Sunday morning I ran a 2 hour workshop on silk painting. It was with some trepidation that I volunteered for this as the last one I did didn’t go well at all. I needn’t have worried, it went really well. We had a big bell tent which kept us out of the sun and the breeze. I did a brief demo on gutta and using silk paints, adding salt etc, I knew we wouldn’t have time for them to gutta a design, dry it and paint it, so I bought lots of pre-gutta-ed card designs. All they had to do was paint them, they loved it, they made about three cards each. I’ve already been asked to do a similar workshop at a local WI.

Sunday afternoon I sat in the Yarn and Yammer tent, I did a few rows of crochet on my ripple blanket, chatting and watching the world go by…well actually we were watching five flamingos doing Zumba, but that’s another story!

A tradition now at T&T is the yarnbomb, this years theme was ‘How does my garden grow’ It was amazing, there were vegetables, flowers, bees, even a slug, all knitted by different ladies.

All in all it was a fantastic weekend, as someone remarked, it’s like Girl Guide camp with alcohol 🙂