Art and Baking groups preparing for Christmas 2023
June 2023 Flower Festival
Ladies with Llamas on our August Outing 2023
Fun, friendship and community
Whitley WI is a large and lively group of women. We have a busy programme of meetings and events which are designed to attract and involve the varying ages and interests of all our members. For a flavour of what we do please see our monthly newsletters.
We are always delighted to greet new members and can assure you of a warm and friendly welcome. Our committee members will introduce you to fellow members and make you feel really at home.
Our meetings are held at 7.30pm in Whitley Village Hall on the first Thursday of every month. Drop in and be sure of a welcome.
Join a Sub-Group...make new friends.
Art, Walking, Craft, Baking Beauties, Book Club, Scrabble, Positive Planet, Garden Interest, Darts & Bowls. Please see Subgroups menu for more information.
This campaign is fully supported by NFWI. For more information check out.
www.theclimatecoalition.org
or just enjoy making green hearts with Annette at Craft group.
This year we decided to have a daytime social event to celebrate our birthday, rather than our usual celebration at our Main Meeting.
We had a wonderful sociable Afternoon Tea with delicious refreshments of sandwiches and mini cakes made by our committee and a very tasty and beautifully decorated cake made by Ann O’Brien. Irene Robinson cut the cake, in recognition of the fact she has been a member of Whitley WI for over 70 years.
We did have a short game of bingo towards the end of the afternoon but mostly just enjoyed the tea and the company – a very successful event attended by 35 members.
At our February meeting Mary led the discussion about The Kindness Project by Sam Binnie. Members had a lively discussion and gave the book a score of 6.6/10 – for further details look on the subgroup page.
Our next book is The Marlow Murder Club by Robert Thorogood.
Our President Melanie welcomed 35 members and 3 visitors.
Our speaker was Karen from the local Pets Pantry. She gave an interesting talk on starting in business and how it has developed over the years. She then shared with us her experiences of a 3 month sabbatical in Laos and Thailand.
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.
Jonty told us about Project Linus, a UK charity with provides new, handmade, washable blankets to provide love, a sense of security, warmth and comfort to children, who are sick, disabled, disadvantaged or distressed
Members of Craft Group have been busy knitting squares which Annette has stitched together to make 3 beautiful blankets which will be sent off for the children to enjoy.
Our next meeting will be on Thursday, 2nd 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 27th 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.
