22/06/2026
Hello, long time no see ......
We had a stall at our local Finedon Summer Fayre last Saturday, 20th June 2026. It was a long day. We were there for 9.15 to start putting up our gazebo (well, alright, my son's gazebo,) and my eldest grandson Reece, and Nilani's husband Stephen (Steven) who had kindly volunteered to put this up for us. We are all short and the two gentlemen are not.😂
We had to unload and then move all our cars out of the way as they closed the roads all round the green. Well there was a Fun Fair too where children would be.
The tables we were using were in the back of my car and unfortunately at the bottom of all the mugs in boxes, possibly 12, Donna had some too, however once these were all laid out around the perimeter of the gazebo, (I should have taken a photo,) we were able to put the tables up inside and cover them with cloths. It was getting warm. The ladies who were putting out the mugs were Donna, Glenda, Nilani, Angela and myself. (Well,, Glenda and myself stayed out of the way, there wasn't a lot of room. We let the youngsters do it.
After a few years you cotton on to the fact that it can take ages to find a number if they are not in some sort of sequence. We have always had colours separate. This year, Gwen, who had done the majority of filling the mugs and wrapping them, had the forethought to keep them in order. She also had the idea of keeping mugs that contained things for children under a yellow ticket which was wonderful as the children seemed to think theirs were special, it also made it very easy to spot (well when you have 5 pairs of eyes looking it was. 😁
Glenda's daughter Michele was one of the first at our Gazebo, and she took a photo of us all seated, well Nilani was kneeling and I hope to be able to put this photo on here. I've been having a problem loading them onto the new computer I have. Probably my fault, but it's having time to sort it out. Anyway, back to the Summer Fayre. This didn't start for visitors until 12 noon, which was very sparse, well I suppose they were all at home having their lunch, but around 2pm things started looking up. There were quite a few other things at the Fayre, to name two which were lovely, was tea/coffee thanks to Donna, and Pizza, thanks to Glenda. We didn't sell all of the mugs donated, which was a shame but we sold about half. I hope those left do not have chocolate inside them because they are all back in my car waiting to be stored somewhere. No the sun isn't on there all day but just for a couple of hours in the late evening.
Three times during the afternoon, it came over very dark grey, hello, we thought, looks like rain. Well, as you know, there is rain and there is RAIN and my goodness did it RAIN. but it did cool everywhere down and it wasn't wet underfoot as I suppose the grass snaffled the liquid very quickly. People didn't seem to mind getting wet. We were on the green outside the Mission Room, where we meet. Almost!!! the Council plonked a humungous stage directly outside the Mission Room and it did get quite noisy. We were quite near to it sadly. We should have had squashy tomatoes for one or four of the singers, though some were not too bad, but I expect they enjoyed their 5 minutes of torturing us. Some were really bad😭😭 and I have no idea what the song was. He couldn't remember the words whilst belting it out and he kept shouting, "I'm Sorry" people were kind and still applauded. I wondered if he was the one who looked like Rod Stewart - well an very old version but with blonde hair.
The Finedon Council gazebo folks started putting away their things around 4pm (it was due to finish at 5pm) so I said, if they can pack up, so can we. In the notes we got, it said if we wanted to pack up early we had to ask the Council if we could. 😄.
Nilani recalled Stephen and I recalled Reece to get the Gazebo down once we had stashed away the remainder of the mugs. We asked a Councillor if they would be doing a Christmas Fayre, but he said no. We always sold out at those, the mugs were ideal for children to give as a gift. There might be somewhere else we can go though.
On another note, we have also entered the Finedon Church Flower Festival. We said could we take flowers we were making, and we were told they had had felt flowers and knitted ones, so yes, why not. So a reasonably large order went out for Artistasoft and Modena and we have started making flowers. The theme for the flower festival is 'Myths and Legends'. We missed the Phoenix that Donna and I would have gone for as someone beat us to it, ☹️ but we are doing ours based on The Unicorn. More to follow on that. This isn't until September, so our members have plenty of time. They have been asked to make as many flowers and leaves as they can from a packet of each. We will see in August what they have come up with.
I do have lots of photos from the last 18 months or so that I hope to get on here so you can see what else we have been doing.
It is almost ten to one in the morning, so I am off now. Hope you have happy reading and hope to be back on here again soon. xx
Left to right, Donna x, Angela x, Nilani x, Shirley x and Glenda. x
