thank you very much!

A big thank you to Pamela and the Royal Docks Community School for inviting us to make Morsbags with some of their special needs pupils over the last couple of weeks.  It was an absolute pleasure for us and we were delighted with the lovely thank you cards you made for us.  We hope the young people like their new bags and get lots of Easter eggs to put in them.

Thanks too to Darren for his talk on osteopathy last week.  Now we all feel guilty about our high heels and are thinking about giving them up, abandoning breast stroke and taking up Pilates.  We were so shaken up that we had to take consolation from the first class cakes at the Skylight Cafe on Friday morning - top marks for the caramel shortbread and the lovely atmosphere.

While we are on the subject of cakes, let's have a huge round of applause for EEWI member Christine for the cross stitch sampler she made for us. We'll be showing it off at our cake stalls throughout the spring and summer.  We'll put up the dates here - don't miss us.

And finally, ta, tata and bon voyage to Nadine who has been looking after us at Chisenhale.  We'll miss you and hope that they look after you in Berlin as well as you have looked after us.

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.

conquered

This is how Richard Reynolds, Guerrilla Gardener, summarised our meeting last night: Friendly diverse conversation with East End WI: breast painting, marathon pelvic floor exercises, Burmese refugee mushroom houses and walnut cake.

I'm not sure tthat here is much more to add. Other than Morsbags. Lots more stunning Morsbags.

I am a completely conquered by Guerilla Gardening and loving the scent of from my South London grown and made Lavender bag. Also contemplating the dance project - still time to sign up if you email us. And giving some thought to the mushroom houses at Hsa Thoo Lei Learning Centre in Thailand. If you missed the talk, here is some more info on the Centre:

Hsa Thoo Lei Learning Centre provides a free education for 700 children, and is home to about 200: these are children whose parents are dead or who are still inside Burma. Whether the children live in Hsa Thoo Lei or with family or friends outside, they are all in desperate poverty. The school tries to provide two free lunches a week when funds permit (not at all this calendar year) because for some children that is the only proper meal they ever eat. The children learn all the usual subjects but additionally learn languages - Burmese and Karen, the tongues of their homeland, Thai which is the language of their country of residence, and English, which many hope will one day be a passport to a better life elsewhere.

The Burmese migrant children in these schools are vulnerable to malnutrition, especially since the schools’ income is very much below levels required to fund regular school lunches. The Thai children’s Trust with help from partner organisations aims to ameliorate this situation by promoting the introduction of mushroom houses.

A mushroom house grows mushrooms in pre-prepared spore bags, placed on racks in a hot and humid hut. Regularly tended, the spore bags will produce mushrooms over a 3 month cycle. For most of the cycle there will be mushrooms available to supplement the diet of the children in the school. At the peak of the cycle there will be mushrooms for the school to sell.

Many thanks to all our speakers for such stimulating and thought provoking talks.

Comments welcome!

morsbag making

For some reason, we thought that our Morsbag Making August meeting would be fairly quiet. But take 20 women, coffee tasting, cake and cookie testing and wine drinking and it turned out to be rather busier than we expected.

We started off with a talk from Rachael from City and Hackney Mind. She reminded us that one in four people is likely to suffer from a mental health problem at some point and welcomed our support for their work. Look out from more info here on their October Awareness day.

Alex and Yasmin from Cafe Direct, who generously sponsor us with the provision of coffee and tea for our EEWI stalls throughout the year, showed a film describing the way they work with growers yes, it did make me a bit teary) before we moved on to a coffee tasting session. Who would have guessed at the power of the collective EEWI palate? Read more about it on the Cafe Direct blog, with thanks to Alex for his kind words.

The more prudent among us saved the goodies to have with coffee- Coffee Crunch Bars, Coffee Victoria Sponge and Blueberry Muffins. Thanks to Veronica, Elizabeth and the maker of the muffins ( sorry - did not catch your name!


So... 20 women, two sewing machines, an ironing board, lots of snipping and sipping (OK, yes, there was some wine) ...result ONE MORSBAG!

Well, it was a busy evening and for some of us this was a new experience. Happily, lots of you took home some cut fabric to finish off and make up. Looking forward to seeing them in September.