This blog post is taken from our own blog site www.beadbarmy.com but as i've been raving about the tea parties on the forum boards I thought i'd like to share an exert here too.
Diets have been tossed to the wind. Ovens have been on overdrive. Our first RNLI tea party has been held and it went down a treat!
On February 3rd 2011, Tracey Mallaby held the first Sea and Cakes party on our behalf to help us reach our £10,000 target for the RNLI. By all accounts it was a roaring success and a fine time was had by all. When Tracey contacted us to tell us what she had planned, we were overwhelmed with her efforts. We would have been more than happy with a slice of battenberg and a cuppa but we should have known that they don’t do things by halves in the North East! Her list of cakes left us drooling and wanting to catch the next available train to Darlington. Tracey very kindly sent us some recipes so we wouldn’t be left starving in the South. It included her very own secret pumpkin cake recipe never before shared! To see the recipes please see the full post at http://www.beadbarmy.com/?p=2690
Sailing on the high teas
Tracey told us how her gourmet delights went down and what a fine time they all had. A word of caution: We recommend you don’t read this when you’re hungry or, alternatively, read on armed with a big slice of cake!
My first guests arrived at 10.10am, with a steady stream of friends and neighbours following over the next hour or so. My friends Jane and Allie brought butterfly cakes and orange mocha whoopie pies to help out. We drank many cups of tea, coffee and juice and got stuck into pumpkin cake, strawberry chocolate cake, fudge muffins, pumpkin muffins, lemon curd muffins, cranberry choc chip muffins, banana bread, the butterfly cakes and whoopie pies! The RNLI SOS pins sold well too. As I didn’t really know what to charge people I placed a money box (in the shape of wellies) on the side and told people to eat and drink as much as they pleased and to place what they deemed an appropriate amount in the ‘honesty wellies’, it worked really well. Almost everyone had left by 12noon, apart from Allie and her partner Matthew who had travelled about 40 minutes to attend, they were also coming to visit the boy ratties we had rehomed for them last September. So once everyone had gone, we had fun with the rats and fed them a little banana cake too. In all, there were 16 of us, it was very noisy, warm and a heap of fun. Between us we have raised £70, I’m so proud of and grateful for my lovely friends.
Tracey managed to raise £70 which was a stunning result. We are extremely grateful to her for all her hard work and we love the idea of the ‘honesty welly’.
Sea and Cakes party hosts
If you fancy hosting a tea party you can email us at creative@beadsunlimited.co.uk for a starter pack. Please entitle your email ‘Sea and Cakes’. It doesn’t have to be anything as lavish as Tracey’s do. Even if you can’t cook, why not pick up a cake from the supermarket and sell it by the slice in your workplace? Every penny you make will go straight to the RNLI. There will be prizes for our favourite cake and event and for the tea party that raises the most money.
For details of our other fundraising events please visit our Virgin fundraising page
Our yarn begins in the Summer of 2007 when we were asked to take part in a fashion show raising funds for local charities. Although the event was a lot of work for what amounted to two minutes of catwalk exposure, the end result was well worth it. We came out of it with a few marvellous, if impractical, beaded items, some hilarious anecdotes and a warm glow inside from giving a little bit of help where it’s needed. The main problem, when trying to show off beads, is that they’re generally small, even the big ones! Therefore some extravagant and larger than life creations were needed. We set our crack designer team (consisting of one at the time) on the case. The results included a two and a half foot high tiara, a hat befitting a day at Ascot and a bag so heavy with beads it needed to come with a health warning!
Problems became apparent on the day of the dress rehearsal. We had decided that the only way the tiara would stay put was by pinning it to our models’ hair with about seventy five hairgrips. What we’d failed to take into consideration was the thirty second costume change, which included a different dress and swapping the tiara for the aforementioned uber bag! So there the three of us were, trying desperately to remove the tiara from the poor models’ head without scalping her. To add to the chaos was the shows director who was flapping around and bellowing orders as if we were on the catwalks of Milan. I have to give it to her, our model was made of tougher stuff than I. As we gingerly removed the grips she just hung on to her hair and ordered us to pull, pull, pull! Anyway, learning from our mistakes, we decided that the way forward was for our stalwart model to simply hold the tiara in place, which she did with grace, ease and good humour.
The red hat has actually come in very handy since the event. Apart from being used in the odd window display at The Brighton Bead Shop, I decided to have a hat themed party. With my heavily encrusted headpiece how could I fail not to be the star of my own show? Actually, successful as it was, I did have to swap it for something more modest during the course of the evening. After not too long, my head started to resemble a giant tomato due to the heat of wearing it. Plus, I thought it may be a tad embarrassing to turn up in A & E with a heavy hat related neck injury!
This story is taken from our blog site BeadBarmy.com
Just incase you've not seen this on the message boards, Beads Unlimited are running a beading competition on our 
