Award Winning!

When I was at university, I joined RAG. This is a society that fundraises for charity through running events or standing on a street corner waving a bucket at unsuspecting passers-by. Through RAG, I attended many events across the country organised by the charities for student fundraisers. At the events, I made many friends from RAGs at other universities.

After leaving university, RAG stopped but the desire to continue to collect cash for charity did not and I carried on attending these events, often by helping out by counting the money or supporting the collectors while they were out working hard.

The Ragabonds are a group of ex-Raggies. A RAG for those without a RAG. In the three years that we have been officially together, we have raised a stupid amount of money between us for many different charities across the UK. We also help out behind the scenes, working with the charities to help organise and run events.

This week we were awarded "RAG fundraiser of the year" by the Breast Cancer Campaign due to our effots for them last year. I myself raised nearly £2000 for BCC last year so I'm really excited that we have been recognised =)

Painted Kiwi

I painted my Kiwi spinning wheel. The wheel itself I have painted with a colour wheel so that when it spins, it looks like a rainbow. This is the kiwi on the treadle. Don't look too closely at the mistakes!

The wheel is not perfect. The yellow is much brighter than the other colours so stands out a lot. I think I need to go and buy some purple to try and balance it out a bit! Also, I think it would have looked better with thinner stripes. I did 6 big blocks, one of each colour but if I were to do it again, I think I would do 12 or 18 stripes to see if I could get the colours to blend more.

New Look

I have changed how my site looks. I like this one much better =) I was getting annoyed that my pictures were wider than the space available in the old layout so I looked for a wider layout and found this pretty pink one! I hope you like.

This has been partly inspired by my new camera. I get money for Christmas from my parents. This year, I decided to treat myself to a new camera. There was nothing really wrong with the old one except that it was a bit old. It used a memory card that seems to be hard to buy now and when we went to Chicago last year, I kept having to go and get the card emptied onto CD so I could take more pictures.


I found a lovely little camera, the Fuji Z35. It had 10 megapixels and a bunch of settings and featured that I wanted like face recognition, anti shake and automatically resizing for blog posting. I ordered mine from Jessops. It never came :( On the fourth of June I FINALLY got my refund after too many phonecalls; broken promises of call backs and that the refund had been processed and having to give them my card details at least three different times. I had to threaten legal action in the end but nevermind.

I went into town to spend my refund this week. Naturally the camera I wanted is no longer widely available so instead I have a beautiful Fujifilm Finepix AV180. It is shiney!


It is so much lighter than my old one. It has a massive screen. It has 14 (FOURTEEN!) megapixels although I'm not sure why anyone other than a professional photographer would need that many. It also automatically sets itself. It knows if it needs a flash or the macro setting. It has about 15 settings for light/dark/fireworks/landscape/panoramic/baby shots (!) etc. It uses a standard SD card that is widely available. I already have two 2GB ones that I bought in January for the original lost camera.

I'll be having a play with it to test the settings out.

Flowers

For my birthday in May, I also received some flowers in the post from Phill's parents. I've never had flowers delivered before so it was very exciting!

They were most beautiful and lasted almost two weeks. I love lilies and roses and these were lovely ones.


I also received this planter from Anna and Joe. It's a giant teacup!

I have already planted some carrots in it. As it is very shallow, I was really pleased to find these little golf ball carrots. They have germinated and need thinning out. I will take some pictures of that soon.