Green Unconference (by sarah)

Today I attended the first ever Green Unconference in Long Ashton near Bristol, organised by Daniel Lewis. It was an amazing setting with brilliant speakers - I only wish more of the people I'd invited had turned up but apparently most of them hadn't seen the FaceBook invite until the event was actually taking place 🙁

I have come away saddened but optermistic and re-energised about the stuff I do to try and be a bit more friendly to the planet. Everything from government policies to how to garden to how to save/use waste food to feed those who are increasingly needing to use the food banks in this country was disguessed. I myself did an Upcycling and Junk Art workshop - complete with a mini talk and slides.

It was the most gorgous setting for a workshop

The girls were about as well behaved as I think I could realistically expect :/ I think Jeany eat most of the buffet before we officially had stopped for lunch!

I'm glad that people are taking on board that the average family can not afford or percieves at the least that they cannot afford organic food and that steps are being taken towards sorting this out. I wish I had managed to catch a few more of the talks but they clashed with my workshop and we had to leave early due to having triple booked ourselves for the day :/

I am going to attempt write up a few more of my junk art and upcycling projects. In making the slide show I realised I had a lot of material which I may try to collect together into at min an ebook.

(There will be a follow up post or two of the fantastic photos I got of bits of the church though I forgot to take one from outside 🙁 )

And talking of e-books don't forget to download your copy of The Little Book of Spoogy Poetry before midnight on the 31st of October! Click the image below for your free PDF.

Halloween Hunt At Primrose Vale 2012 (by sarah)

We went to Primrose Vale Farm shop for the Halloween Hunt as we have done for the last few years but we were an hour early so we had our breakfast which we were going to have as an elevenses later on. Jean was horrified that it didn't start until 10 am 'That's nearly lunch time!'

Mary resented being in her buggy so went off for a wonder.

Her sister joined her

Then they went to play on the swings

There was the cutest blonde bunny that Jean pointedly ignored (still being too sad about Blacky Buns departure to the meadow in the sky) and that Mary spent ages pointing too and announcing Ca'!

Me and Jean had the most delicous icing and chocolate covered apple danishes whilst Mary had everything free batty cupcake that Mummy had made especially for her little allergy bunny.

Jean decided that being in her lovely coat and wearing her pretty dress it was time to go and do some construction work.

Mary decided that it was time to leave home and found herself a nice little shack

We then went on the Halloween Hunt which both girls loved!

Jean loves Harry Potter and Scooby Boo so was very very happy with a few of the things on the Halloween trail 🙂

Jean tried to show Mary how the Pumpkin and spoon race worked but didn't entirely do it properlly herself!

Mary just didn't get it at all but loved running around with the minni pumpkin!

So much so that Jean decided to buy her one to take home with us!

The girls loved the maze thingy made of trees and we started working on a poem about it - maybe it will make it into a little book of poetry at some point :).

I found a cool piece of farm equipement to photo - sadly I forgot to ask what it was for 🙁

We then walked down to Subway for lunch and saw a heron! It flew right over the top of us in it slow ungainly way - Jean couldn't remember what it was just that it was one of the 'Mill' birds.

If you want to see any of the photos in a bigger format just click on them 🙂

Also don't forget to download your free copy of The Little Book of Spoogy Poetry - it is only free until midnight on the 31st of October!

Green Unconference 2012 (by sarah)

Saturday I will be running an Upcycle and Junk Art workshop as part of the fantastic programme for the first ever Green Unconference.

This pot of flowers made from an old New Scientist mag, a tin can and a jumper will be on of the things I will be showing people how to make 🙂

I will also have some other bits with me including stuff to make visual poetry greeting cards, collage and maybe a festival sheep (if I can fit it in with the kids in the car!). There are going to be some really cool talks going on at the Unconference so if anyone is in the Bristol/Bath area they should check it out 🙂 Its all free by the way.

Anniversaries :) (by sarah)

This weekend saw my brother and sister-in-laws 1st wedding anniversary (well not actually it was like the weekend before or something but close enough) 🙂 I made cake and things - photos of that will be on here as soon as I can get Al to upload them off his phone!

It was also my mum and dad 34th anniversary on the Sunday so we had some lovely outings 🙂 And I'm looking forward to doing a large 35 cake for next year 😉

We went to the Cathedral and the Beatrix Potter place and cream teas were involved.

Wow! And things I learnt (by sarah)

I had over 100 downloads of my The Little Book of Spoogy Poetry yesterday and lots of lovely feedback - people seem to like the poems and love the illustrations. I am aware that it was basically friends or other writers from various social networks which might explain the lack of any negative feedback.

But I was thinking that I would only get 100 downloads over all and that I would probably be begging people on the 31st to download it to make it up to that number 🙂

I now have a cute vid of me and the girls reading some of the poems.

Mistakes I made - I forgot to sort out the IRC channel, and though I remembered Facebook in both personal, writer and artists page and the event itself, I completely forgot about MySpace. I discovered I didn't really know how to use Google+ Hangouts and that keeping tabs on what I'd posted to which twitter account, linkedIn and FB was a bit of a headache (plus keeping three blogs upto date) - the solution to that is to get around to sorting something like tweetdeck out on this laptop which would allow me to see and post updates to all of them at the same time!

I should have also made more banners in a larger variety of sizes and made sure that my websites could express the example images ok.

Another mistake that I only really discovered this morning is that I run the launch party on British time but I have very few actual readers in the UK. This ment my timezones were out and people arrived on the online stuff after I was asleep 🙁 This ment they missed out on author interaction but all the freebies were still sitting there for them.

Also as I haven't have my laptop for months I had sort of drifted off the radar of all the writing groups and chats and things like that and infact found that less people than normal spoke to me on Facebook yesterday :/ But it went well and I am happy 🙂

Having a few people actually physically here helped 🙂

In the future I think I would combine the virtual launch with the physical especially with The Little Books but I'm not quiet decided on that one yet 🙂 I think a listening party is needed at the bare minimum 😉

Jean and Mary thought it was all great.

The PDF will still be available for free download until the 31st of October. Click the image below to download it 🙂