WHITLEY WI

Our President Melanie welcomed 35 members and 3 visitors.

We voted on the WI resolutions. Members were then informed of upcoming events, including a Birthday afternoon tea party, a May day outing, a holiday to Bletchley Park and Cambridge, an evening with comedian Jamie Sutherland, a couple of events learning new crafts and the group Spring lunch.

The sub-group leads informed us what was happening in their sub-group and what they were doing to prepare for entries to the Cheshire Show.

Our next meeting will be on Thursday, 2^nd March and the theme will be A Welsh Evening. The competition will be a Welsh Souvenir and members have been asked to bring along a daffodil, preferably unusual, for a display .

This month the topic was a family recipe. Nine members met to offer their recipe, some to honour a family member, others searched very old cook books for inspiration. This resulted in a variety of bakes including a luncheon cake dating back to 1899, egg custard, tea breads, apple cake, walnut bars, Anzec biscuits, meringues and sticky chocolate cake.

We are keen to enter for the Cheshire show this year so we had some discussion about gingerbread as this is one of the classes. Jontyn spoke about the original gingerbread of Ormskirk which dated back to the 1800’s which was served on trains in the area by gingerbread ladies. A lively discussion followed on other gingerbread recipes and ingredients.

Our next meeting is Friday 24th February at 1.30 and members are asked to make ‘Gingerbread people’. This will give us ideas and practice to hopefully generate some Whitley entries in the Cheshire Show.

Our topic for this meeting was ‘A Magical Place’ as we hope to inspire some of our group to enter a piece of their work in this category for the Cheshire Show. A few of our group couldn’t make the meeting this month but 6 of us did discuss the theme, and Ann C shared a piece of work that she has already done.

We looked at various ‘magical place’ pictures from the web and also some magical places in literature, to fit the Shows overall theme of ‘Once upon a time’. The group who were with us today struggled a bit with this ‘magical’ theme but 3 of us did have a go at painting Aslan from ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’, while more experienced members continued with their own piece of work.

Our next meeting will be on Monday 27^th February at 1.30. The theme is ‘Daffodils’, maybe we can produce some pictures to share at our Welsh meeting the following week. Alternatively members may wish to continue with the ‘magical place’ idea with hopefully at least some entries for the Cheshire Show.

The craft group had a great meeting in January learning about crochet work. Our old friend Joan Pattinson came along to share the many items that she had made over the last 40 years, including one of her very first projects. She had a wonderful display of different items – mats, toys, flowers and her latest project, a beautiful colourful bobble hat. She also had lots of books and magazines with some amazing pieces of work that we could aspire to!

Joan had printed off some instructions for us all to follow and, ably assisted by Annette, she demonstrated how to hold the hook, wrap the wool around our fingers and get started. We all managed to make a chain, though some of us struggled to turn around to get a more substantial piece of work! Several did manage to produce a very respectable ‘square’ of crochet, and the terms ‘double’ and ‘treble’ crochet started to make sense.

It was a real fun afternoon, as ever the mistakes all added to the entertainment. Lovely home made cookies were a bonus!

Thanks very much to Joan for her expertise, Annette for keeping us all on track and to Joan B for handling the refreshments!

Next month we will be discussing ideas for what classes we might want to take part in at the Cheshire Show, our WI hopes to have lots of entries in 2023

Melanie thanked everyone who contributed to our very successful Christmas Party and Pat S was presented with a plant in thanks for the splendid buffet she provided.

Future events include an Afternoon Tea on Thursday 16^th February at 2pm in the Village Hall to celebrate our birthday. All are welcome, particularly those who find attendance at winter evening meetings difficult.

Cheshire/National events this month include a weekly Pilates Zoom class on Saturday mornings, a craft workshop at WI house on Sat 25^th March and a Zoom meeting for International Women’s Day on 9^th March. Please contact Melanie for further details.

Our speaker was Sarah Darlington from ‘Mrs Darlingtons Preserves, Jams and Chutneys’. Sarah was an excellent speaker who told us about how the business developed from small beginnings making Lemon Curd from cracked eggs on the family farm in the 1980s.

Still a family business, the production has now moved to purpose built premises near Crewe and sells its products across the UK and in other parts of the world including the Scandinavia, US, Australia and even the Falkland Isles. We all tasted some delicious tartlets filled with the Darlington’s lemon curd and Sarah also provided sample jars from a selection of preserves. Sue R thanked Sarah for her fascinating talk. Look at https://mrsdarlingtons.com for more information.

After refreshments, Jean outlined the national WI resolutions for 2023 and ways members can get involved in debate and voting. There will be a meeting on Monday 30^th January at 2pm in the Village Hall where members can come along to discuss these in more detail prior to a vote at our main meeting in February.

Annette presented a prize to Sheila C, winner of the Garden Quiz. Many members have enjoyed trying to solve this quiz over the past few weeks. An interesting and entertaining challenge. Thank you, Annette.

Our next main meeting will be on Thursday February 2nd where the speaker will be Karen Hodgkins talking about ‘Pets, Pantries and Saving the Planet’