A TEACHING TEDDY - who would have thought that one of Anne's 50 hand knitted teddies would get emmployment! A nursery teacher in a school in County Durham has a little helper. Every day this nursery teacher does her morning routine with the children about staying safe with Blue Bear as her helper. She starts every session talking about 4 things: (1)stay safe with our space - Blue Bear is always high up as he is social distancing (2)wash our hands lots of times (3)catch our coughs (4)catch our sneezes She then reminds the children that if they need clean or dry clothes or hurt themselves, she will put on a mask, apron and gloves like Blue Bear. She puts on each item and points out Blue Bear's mask and apron as she does. She says it's working well as the children relate to her

Our annual Safari Supper BRIEF was THRIFT in keeping with our ENVIRONMENTAL theme. Outfits to be: borrowed, from the back of the wardrobe, no more that £10 spent at a charity shop. Based on a Downton Abbey theme with prizes for Best Upstairs and Best Downstairs ensembles members made such an effort. We thought long and hard about the buffet aiming for not much food waste. £400 was raised for Food Poverty in our local area (more about this later!) Sue joined us via Messenger! Shared winners of Best Dressed Downstairs Louise S & Karen H and they stayed in role all evening! Liz – winner of Best Dressed Upstairs Who’s that sneaking into my stables now? Is it that Lady Mary? Again?!

Having read about the challenge in the local press last year creative wizz of a member Rosemary attended a  Stitchathon with nonstop sewing for 14 hours last week, and several more hours work since then,  Our club is so happy to report tonight that she has now finished nearly 100 WIGGLY BAGS for chemotherapy tubes and equipment ( around child’s neck during treatment) and 47 ‘BEADS FOR BRAVERY’  bags to store the beads they are awarded for different parts of their treatment.Rosemary is ‘extremely grateful for the support of five other members  in various ways, financial and with components‘ ….so  feels it can be regarded as a club project. (One fifth of club involved so far.) Rosemary continues, ‘The thought of the children, their diagnoses and suffering breaks my heart. Thankfully treatment is becoming more and more successful.Thanks to all members.’

Our club has adopted the ENVIRONMENT as our theme for the year starting with raising awareness about the amount of plastics, especially SINGLE USE PLASTIC, we use. So what have we done so far? Several members saved the plastics used for 7 days and were willing to display for our perusal – we were shocked!! Next step – members have set a target to follow until our next meeting in September when we will review.

Sandra Graham, Margaret Hall, John O’Shea, Jo Kirwin, our local councillors spent several minutes listening to members chat about the important work we do for our local community and of course further afield. It was a wonderful opportunity to network and what was awesome was the interest in our club and how many people had heard of THE SOROPTIMISTS!! How amazing is that?!

It was a warm and windy day when Soroptimist Sisters Barbara and Louise arrived bright and breezy at the crack of dawn to set up stall!! We had fun! Sold loads of rubbish! Raised £35 for Toilet Twinning! Anything left over we dropped off at Barnardo’s up the road so WIN – WIN – WIN for all. Thanks Barbara for not selling my prescription sunglasses for 50p!!

Only two members but we litter picked along the way! Steve & Des – volunteers and organisers of Friends of Brierdene and firm friends of our club too!

Welcome to new member Sandra – it’s good to have you on board & you’re into the Environment – awesome! Welcome back Vivianne – everyone is so happy to have you on board and we look forward to having fun with you too!

Always looking to spread the amazing work of our club we came up with the idea of designing our own postcard. What better way than to invite local printer Michelle Wood of Sea Tern Print CIC, a social enterprise business. a Community Interest Company (CIC) Members were asked to do a little sketch to represent their idea of the ENVIRONMENT, our theme for the year. Using the Dynamic S as much as possible Michelle has created a wonderful, colourful,positive image of our clubs situation on the North East coast – check out the dynamic S’s – I think I can count 15! Michelle brought her portable printing press, gave a wonderful presentation about her aim to provide creative print sessions for people of all ages and abilities to promote well being and good mental health. All profits go to helping e.g. supporting charities, doing open