Handbags, Cake & The Fickle Finger of Fate

These beautiful handbags are made from paper and card, beautiful gift bags, each one with a gift card and envelope inside. 

Perfect for the bazaar, and quickly snapped up.   

Someone else donated some delicious home made fudge.  People are so kind, these little gestures really help pad things out and sweeten the mix of things on offer.

The giant tombola stall is always popular, even though prizes ranged from toilet cleaner right the way up to champagne.

This beautiful cake was made by Miss Read's son and was then iced and decorated by Miss Read herself.  She raffles one each year.   I don't know how many years she has been doing it, but I do know that her raffle ticket sales add greatly to the final total; the cakes are as delicious inside as they look beautiful on the outside.

This was the main raffle stall, directly inside the entrance doors, the chilliest position in the hall.  It was run by 'The local Squire's' wife.

The two ladies who are buying their tickets are born and bred village residents.   They are always wonderfully supportive and appreciative, and very sweet, to boot.

Each year they shop until they drop, then they sit down and enjoy a pot of tea and some hefty slices of home-baked cake, chatting away until it is time for the raffles to be drawn.



I had a stall with a bran tub at one end, the Rudolph game at the other, angels and fairies in between,  including the raffle for the three fairies, though one has now grown pixie ears, so it was for two fairies and a pixie.

The hall was filled to the brim at times, even though only a small percentage of the local people turned out.     Angel and fairy sales went well, so did the bran tub - and the Rudolph game ensured that the hall was filled with the sound of laughter.     Participants and spectators all got the giggles. 

Miss Read kept forgetting about filling out raffle stubs and had much more fun watching the children play with Rudolph!

When things finally quietened down,  the main raffle was drawn.   These days we don't have dozens of small prizes, we tend to go for making up hampers and stockings.   This year there was a 'male' stocking, a 'female' one, a mystery wrapped hamper and the main prize was an enormous Christmas hamper.

It was filled to the brim with delicious eats, treats, drinks, crackers, toys, chocolates, a beautiful plant...

While the draw was taking place I turned my attention to the fairy raffle - checked the envelope with the winning fairy name against the entry sheet and saw to my horror that my granddaughter had written her name in the winning square for her £1 entry...without insider information, or access to the answer.

Hey ho!


Meanwhile, the large hamper prize was being drawn - " and the main hamper goes to XXX"...XXX being my granddaughter!

I decided that emergency action was required, after all I could easily make three special fairies for her....     Fortunately,  attention was then turned to the cake raffle.

I grabbed a pair of scissors and got snipping all the squares of fairy names and put them into a paper bag. 

The beautiful cake was won by the landlord of the local Tavern.   Then it was my fairy raffle.

I held the paper bag out for someone to draw the winning name..   Remember the photograph of the two women buying their raffle tickets?  I was delighted to see that the one in the blue coat had won the fairies!

She was thrilled, had the most enormous smile on her face and said that she wanted to give the three fairies to the little girl she had been standing next to when she purchased her ticket, because the little girl had really wanted to win, and had been telling her all about the fairies as she carefully printed out her name in her best handwriting, she is six years old.   

You guessed it, the little girl was my granddaughter!

Those fairies were destined to be hers and I shouldn't have tried to divert them, except that by doing so I made an elderly woman very happy, too.