Community Volunteers & Charity Afternoon Tea

Friday the 13th was supposed to be unlucky, but I spent it on an enjoyable afternoon at the Community Volunteers & Charity Afternoon Tea over at Petone Working Men's Club in Udy Street. This was another event hosted by the Hutt Valley Chamber of Commerce, this time a charity event inviting charities and volunteer organisations to come and network and participate in raffles, prize draws and other good causes. It was a great pleasure to find prominent councillors among our guest speakers, including the Deputy Mayor. They clearly see the value of charities and volunteer organisations to our community.

I was there as part of my Petone Toastmasters group and promoting Toastmasters speech craft. But there was nothing to stop business organisations coming too, so business cards were exchanged as much as the information on charities and volunteer organisations.

Many familiar charities and volunteer organisations were there, including St Johns Ambulance, Volunteer Hutt and Te Omanga Hospice. There were some surprises and things I will bear in mind, such as Coffee News, a newspaper edition to enjoy over a cup of coffee, and Skylight, an organisation that offers counselling and professional services for when you are going through tough times and emotional crises. But perhaps the biggest surprise of all was St John's pens - the pens come out with pullout banners of first aid tips!

Fringe Festival

It is always good to expand your skills into public areas outside business. So I have been expanding my creative skills into the Fringe Festival. The Fringe Festival is Wellington's "biggest little arts festival". It runs from 20 February to 14 March 2015, and has over 50 venues in the Wellington area. More information can be found here.

One of these 50 venues features my own contribution to the Fringe Festival. It is on the traffic island in the CBD on the corner of High Street and Andrews Avenue Lower Hutt. The traffic island has been decorated with frames of flowers that are made from either wool or plastic bottles. Five frames are on the island, plus clusters of standing plastic flowers. But mine is the only frame that features wool flowers; the others are all covered with plastic bottles turned into floral art. My frame appears on the right of the photograph below. The flowers are made from my own handspun wool and they include roses, daisies, poppies, carnations, sunflowers, and products of the imagination.