Our first Charity Ball

Last Monday we held the event we have all been waiting for...our first charity ball.

It was all to raise money for the Purple Teardrop Campaign which raises awareness of the fight against human trafficking.

Our book group has accidentally spent the year reading books which all seemed to carry this theme somewhere within them...so we decided to act on it. We gathered together all our mates and this is what happened.

Our wedding caterers did a fantastic job of creating a three-course canape supper

which included hand printed 'happy christmas' biscuits!



They worked really hard in our kitchen behind the scenes.

The ballroom looked amazing and all because of our Holly and 'You Tube' instructions on creating a balloon arch! What did one do before 'You Tube'?!

This is the girls setting it up. Each balloon cost £10 and there were 67 (out of 100) incredible prizes attached to each balloon to ensure almost everyone was happy! We also had a silent auction in a different room for the bigger prizes.

At the last minute the ferret man cancelled :( He said it was too cold for the ferrets to be outside..it was 11 degrees!!!! Instead we changed the plan to Bug Racing and provided 5 wind-up bugs!

Our friend Angela, who is not a florist, did an amazing job of creating flower arrangements all over the place.

We want to say a big thank you to all those who gave so generously and others who worked so hard to make this event happen. We sold all 150 tickets and raised a total of £4,000!

For very lovely and professional pictures by Pete Cox, please see our Facebook page.

Thank you x

Its Christmas!

We love Christmas here at Pickwell!

It is a really creative area here, so at various times through the year the village hall has a craft fair.

One of our recommended suppliers for weddings Juicy Lucy cup cakes  has extended her repertoire and started making 'cake pops'. What a wonderful wedding cake idea!

A good idea is to bulk buy Christmas cards, put them together in small packs, seal them in clear bags and sell them!

Our friend has recently taken up painting. Despite having 4 kids and being chair of the parent committee at school, she keeps producing these wonderful and colourful canvas creations.

The Sweatpea vintage co are two dynamic grandmothers with an amazing eye for all things vintage. Their blend of creativity and fun and eye for detail makes everything they make feel like a must-buy.

Another good idea is to rescue little chairs from the skip, paint them, make cushions for them and sell them!

Two of our Pickwellians, Zac and Liza made their own driftwood trees and put them up for sale. They sold four! The deal was that they could keep half the money and spend the other half on someone else.

Great idea no.4 buy tiles and some clothes pegs and decorate them beautifully to make unique coasters and pegs for hanging cards/shopping list on fridge/children's artwork..thanks to Pickwell Holly and Shelly for all the fab creative ideas.

We were so inspired by all this creativity that Tracey and I signed up for a soap and candle-making course! Here is the result of our special Pickwell lavender and oats hand-made creation..we are hoping to give each 2012 guest a little soap as a gift. Watch this space!

Our local garden centre (Trelawny) has gone to town on their decorations. Every nook and cranny held a new scene or theme to its wares.

We really enjoyed going round it and our eyes couldn't really take it all in. At various points there were 'photo opportunities' that they had set up.

The Wizard of Oz scene....

can you spot the legs hanging out the bottom of the house?!

I found an old book my Mum gave me about Victorian Christmas decorations, complete with a push-out kit to make your own. The Pickwell girls and I embarked upon it after school. It was great fun.

No Christmas is complete without a nativity.

This year our Millie-Grace was a beautiful angel

and Liza was Mary!

The Christingle service at our local church had us fully feeling the Christmas vibe.

Merry Christmas to you all, with love from Pickwell x

A Shed with a View

There are a lot of shed happenings here at Pickwell at the moment. We are going to be knocking down the 1960's conservatory-type-room at the end of the house. It is a bit of an eye-sore and I must admit that while it exists,

I will never get to have a costume drama filmed here and therefore I will never have a hope of meeting Hugh Grant.

We have, until now used this room as our games room. No longer. (well after January hopefully).

So this left us with the idea to put our games room in a bigger space which is a lovely big shed at the bottom of the Italian Garden, opposite the garages.

This shed has a gorgeous view. It also has roof lights so it is bright and by the time we've finished with it, it will be homely and chic too.

At the same time, we had the idea to add on a bit of a surfboard and wetsuit shack so holiday guests will have somewhere safe and dry to put their boards.

Our laundry room is also going down there, in front of the surf-board shack and will have the advantage of the brilliant view too. Up until now, this shed was the home to our beloved little tractor (and boxes of 'stuff' we hadn't sorted since the move over 3 years ago).

So, now we are faced with needing a new tractor shed..

tra laa! Even our tractor gets a lovely view of the woodland now! Why oh why do we keep developing our storage space?!

This is Martin, part of the Pickwell family, you may have met him before. He rents one of the garages to do his wood crafting and joinery. Martin built an extra rabbit hutch (we have since found out how we managed to get so many babies and can definately confirm we have put a stop to it) and an extra chicken sleeping pad (our 'Gingy' is being picked on so thought we'd give her a break).

Martin made these little areas from old bits of wood that he found lying around. He is embarrassed by what he built, but I love it! Plus the new hutch and Gingy's house get a great perspective all across the back garden.

This is Martin being silly.

So there we have it. The chickens, the tractor, the children playing - everyone at Pickwell gets a shed with a view x

Herman The German

As a belated birthday present our lovely Pickwell Holly gave me a baby 'Herman the German' friendship cake.

Along with this little creamy looking liquid were some strict instructions in how to care for Herman.

It involved ten days of focused stirring, a lot of love while doing so, and a good feed every now and then in order that Herman can be split into babies to give away to loved ones.

We all lived in fear of Holly's last words that as long as the bubbles were there, Herman was still alive.

Given my track record with plants, i was terrified of being responsible for the sudden absence of bubbles and thus the death of poor Herman.

The kids got the concept immediately and it was love and first sight for Zac.

Each day Herman grew and grew in the bowl

Until at last Day 9 arrived and we were able to separate Herman four ways.

Zac chose to give his to his teacher, Liza chose to give hers to her friend Daisy and I gave mine to Tracey.

The baby that was left was ours. We fed Herman a good hearty meal that day, added in some banana and chocolate chunks and cooked him.

It did actually taste great (i don't mean to sound so surprised)and I am sure i felt all that love that Holly had put in as I swallowed and it nestled somewhere around my soul x

Christmas Charity Ball

So, this Christmas we are going to be hosting our first charity ball. Our little book group has been quite stirred up over the issue of human trafficking (slavery) after a few books we have read around the subject. We decided to get together with more of our good local mates and do something about it. Sadly, this is not the whole group. Some had to work and some well, lets be honest, told me where to go when i asked them to come round at 9.15am looking gorgeous for a photo to go in the local press! This one is just us messing around, but is my personal favourite.

We are holding our ball on Monday 19th December. It is £25 a ticket which includes a three-course canape supper, some fantastic music from our resident DJ (that'll be Steve then) and all sorts of special 'sideshows' which altogether will be everything a person needs to get into the Christmas swing! The planning has been great fun - especially when cake is involved.

It is all in aid of the 'purple teardrop campaign' which is a national organisation dedicated to raising awareness about human trafficking. It is hard to believe that even in beautiful and quaint Devon, this is still a live issue and one we need to educate ourselves to recognise.

Thank you to Theo, whose role is entertainment at each meeting . The first meeting we had he awoke from his sleep wearing a witches hat, and at this one he made use of the tea-cosy..never a dull moment... x

Surfers Against Sewage

After the Social Enterprise week, we then had an amazing mediation course through an organisation called Peaceworks. Pickwell Richard actually went on the course himself, and the feedback was outstanding as the 'best course ever been on'. Thank you to Chris Seaton who ran the course and who is responsible for a lot more constructive conversations across the country as a result! Rich may be adding something about this on our Pickwell Manor Facebook Page.

On the same day Chris and the guys left, Surfers against Sewage (SAS) arrived! Or as our good friend Eils has now named them..Smurfs against Sewage...

We knew they had arrived by the wonderful car stickers that appeared in our car park...

I realised it had been years since I'd thought about car stickers

and yet here they were...loads of them!

and this is only a small sample

I think it definitely talks of the passion each car owner has for the surf!

A few guys arrived early to set up, putting news cuttings about the beach and environment and press releases about themselves all over the Ballroom.

Peter came from The Museum of British Surfing, based up the road in Braunton. The board on the right is 100 years old!

The atmosphere was very relaxed as people arrived,

grabbed themselves a glass of Barefoot Wine... (fascinating story behind 'Barefoot' but will save for another occasion).

and ate some extremely dodgy looking pizza! They had to repeat this pizza meal the next day for lunch too, as one of the team who was sent out to buy lunch for the 30ish people there, came back with 8 pasties and wondered why everyone was so aghast! Apparently that's all the shop had left. Ha! The good news is, all prospective Pickwell Brides, these are not our chosen wedding catering team.

This is What SAS had to say in their newsletter following the weekend:

"The SAS team has just returned from our annual SAS Regional Reps training weekend. It is always inspiring to bring our regional leaders together to hear about the SAS campaign actions and projects they’ve been active on for their respective stretch of coastline".

"They bring their local knowledge, local connections, motivations and ideas to help create an increasingly strong national SAS movement tackling coastal pollution."

"The weekend included classroom sessions, interactive presentations and activities, and beach-based exercises. We included a beach clean and, using the collected marine litter, implemented lots of Return To Offender (RTO) activity."

"In just an hour of beach cleaning our team removed 78kgs of litter and then sent over 50 items back to manufacturers through the RTO campaign!"

"We’d like to thank LUSH and the Patagonia Tides Foundation who have been hugely supportive of our Regional Reps in 2011 and of our work tackling marine litter this year."

"We’d like to thank Pickwell Manor for their donation to make the event possible  Thanks to SAS Directors Ben Hewitt, Richard Gregory and Jim Gorrod for all their help with the event."

Tracey and the girls, all fired up over keeping our beaches clean, went to join the group litter picking on Saunton beach.

The only slight problem was the surf was up so the whole group had all gone to surf at Putsborough beach instead!

The good news is folks, it wasn't all work, work, work! x