Gloucester Road WI

In May we tried out some new dance moves at a new venue – St Bonaventure’s Parish Hall.   The venue gave us more space to move around and may become our new home.   Lots of us dressed up in our neon leg-warmers and got to test out our Fame dance moves at Mum Dance – a low impact, high sweat, dance fitness class set to school disco smash hits from late 70’s to early 90’s, where nobody cares if you go the wrong way! 

Mum Dance was founded by Hebe, right here in Bristol, and now has classes all over the country, as well as being featured on BBC News and as one of the top 4 dance classes in the in Ok magazine!

On Tuesday 21st March, Imogen Douglas, a Project Officer in the Plastics and Sustainability team at the Environment Agency gave us a talk on plastic pollution. We learnt about the impacts of plastic pollution and the action that is being taken to prevent it. We got to ask questions on how to make a difference and tackle plastic pollution on a personal level and learnt that you can put your jeans in the freezer, rather than washing them!

Rather than just preventing pollution, the WI likes to take action, so we all made seed bombs out of clay and wildflower seeds to be scattered around the neighbourhood. The clay helps protect the seeds and aids germination, meaning they can be dropped on any vacant piece of land with the hope that they will flower in the summer, helping drainage, wildlife and the absorption of CO2.

On Tuesday 18th April, Ruth Wiles from Clifton Wine School came to talk to us about wine, quiz our knowledge and got us to sample a few glasses also!  Ruth has been teaching about wine for over 20 years, having held approved educator status since 2003.  In 2020 she achieved Highest Honours in the French Wine Scholar.   In short she knows a lot about wine!  She believes life is too short to drink bad wine, so come along and learn what you love about wine and how to find more of it.  https://www.localwineschool.com/bristol/

On Tuesday 21st February, Chris Yeo from the Antiques Roadshow gave us an amusing and information talk about his life in antiques, as well as giving valuations to some objects brought in by our members. Chris was curator of the Ken Stradling Collection in Bristol, an eclectic array of British and European design from the 20th century, and is currently a valuer at Clevedon Salerooms. His specialism is 20th Century art and design and he has appeared regularly on The Antiques Roadshow since 2015. He told us about how fashions change and can affect the price of antiques so you should always buy what you love, rather than what you think might make you money (as it very often won’t!)

On 17th January we held a swishing event, at St Andrews Bowls Club, to swap clothes old and new. It was a well attended event with lots being brought and re-homed, doing our bit to help reduce waste, save money and the planet! Left over items were not binned but taken to other clothes swap events and one smart, new coat was donated to the Bristol Central Library’s Coat Rail, which has coats available throughout the winter for anyone who needs one. While this was only a small contribution to charity we are considering doing a public swishing event next year to raise funds for local charities. Please email us, using the contact page, if you are interested in helping or supporting this event.

On 6 December, we had our annual Christmas Party. Fizz and raffle tickets were sold to raise money for our charity The Square Food Foundation. Everyone brought a dish to share, some from the late, great 2013 Gloucester Road Cook Book! Hannah Lowry won the skittles (again!) and Jo Furney won first prize in the raffle, which was an epic hamper! We also announced our new programme, which can be viewed on our programme page.

In November, we held ad a Personal Styling session with Elise Heptinstall-Holmes of Redefined Styling.

We discussed how to build a capsule wardrobe, what colours to choose, how to use accessories and more!

In October, we held our Annual General meeting to review our annual report and finance report for the year.

Our finances are healthy and we agreed we had had a good mix of different types of event at our monthly meetings. We discussed ideas for next year’s programme.

We discussed how to bring back our Wild Women group who held adventurous and sporty meet ups to try different things like paddle boarding and wall climbing.

We did some pumpkin carving to celebrate Hallowe’en, and some members carvings were very impressive!