look after your spine

Image courtesy of John McLean, Flickr Photostream

Make sure you are sitting comfortably at our next meeting on 16th March when Bow osteopath Darren Chandler. will talk to us about his work and tell us how to look after our backs.  Meeting at Chisenhale Art Gallery , 7.30 for 8pm start - map here.   Tea and coffee provided, but feel free to bring along a bottle if you wish and, of course, we are always happy to test your baking for you.

Our coffee morning will be on Friday 19th March at 10.30am 10.00am at the Skylight Cafe in Commercial Street (map here). The cafe is part of  the education and training offered homelessness charity Crisis to help homeless people find work.  If  you haven't been there yet, you'll find friendly staff and good food at sensible prices.  Nearest Tube station is Aldgate East.

Look forward to seeing you all then.

extra rations

Niki sharing scones with mock cream

I don't know about everyone else, but I have just about recovered from our coffee morning visit to the Ministry of Food exhibition at the Imperial War Museum on Friday. It's a great exhibition, beautifully set out and curated, with lots of information, including films and artefacts, interspersed with art and posters.  It was great to see everyone enjoying the exhibition and it was especially thrilling to see our pretty jams and pickles on display in the period kitchen.

Our visit ended with a very generous spread in the museum Kitchen Front Cafe, courtesy of the lovely people at the Imperial War Museum and the fabulous friendly Company of Cooks staff as a thank you for our participation in the  project.  We were totally spoilt with seven (!) different types of cake to test and ate the equivalent of about a week's rations in one sitting.  After a wee bit of debate (!) we finally agreed on top scores for the ginger cake (wartime recipe), and almond slice, followed closely by the beetroot and cocoa cake and rock cakes. The chocolate syrup sponge, also made to a wartime recipe, was another high scorer .  The jam tarts and scones with mock cream looked very pretty but were less popular with our expert tasters.

If you didn't manage to get along on Friday, you've got the rest of the year to visit.  Don't miss the jam.  Or the cakes.

the trouble with morsbags...

...isn't the cutting or pressing or sewing or unpicking your mistakes or drinking too much tea or eating too many cakes.  No.  It's that there's so many lovely fabrics that it's going to be really, really hard to give them away.

Thanks to Niki for hosting our morsbag session this afternoon and to everybody who worked so hard making them.  And to those who worked hard ooh-ing and ah-ing in the background too.

Look out for more morsbag making soon.

snippets

The vile weather did not put a dampener on our Life Drawing workshop this week. It was wonderful to watch everyone's pieces come together as we followed in Matisses' footsteps creating collage pictures of our model. Thanks to Kate Hardy for running yet another great session and thanks also to Amanda for being our model. Kate's sessions are always very relaxed and she has a brilliant way of bringing people's creativity out even when they are convinced they don't have any.

We also managed to collect some newspapers, pens, blankets and towels for the Celia Hammond Animal Trust in Canning Town. They are always in desperate need for these things as they get through many more than they can afford to purchase. CHAT is an animal hospital, animal shelter and vet clinic offering low priced veterinary care to those who cannot afford vet's fees but who do not necessarily fit into the low income bracket served by other charities. They also have hundreds of cats, kittens, dogs and puppies that need a home.

EEWI will continue to collect these items so please do bring whatever you have to the next meeting. That also goes for your old bras which we have begun collecting again for the charity Knickers4Africa.

We recognise that you may feel a little daft with a bag full of old bras, old newspapers and old blankets but its all in a good cause!

a string of beads

Lovely afternoon last Saturday serving cake, juice and tea to young pirates and their parents in the play event as part of the String of Beads project at the Arts Pavilion in Mile End Park. Fab ending to a great little exhibition bringing back play memories and making new ones for this generation.

Thanks for inviting us - we were delighted to be there!