It’s Macmillan’s big Coffee Morning day! Thank you for helping us to get our latest Macmillan fundraiser off to a great start, and for enabling us to make our first payment of the year of £160 to Macmillan Cancer Support, from sales of our first batch of Coffee With Friends kits and canvases.

We’ll continue to make payments as often as we can, and post monthly updates here on our blog and on Facebook and Twitter so you can see how things are going. We’ve now sold nearly fifty kits/canvases so we’re already looking forward to making our next payment. Thank you again!

Incidentally, this weekend is your last chance to buy the Coffee With Friends kit at its introductory price. From early October the price will increase from £27 to £30. Now’s your chance to grab a lovely autumn stitching project for yourself, or a kit as a gift for a friend or relative.

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Genevieve, our local Macmillan contact, has been involved with our stitching projects for the last few years, and is not too far off finishing off her own Mugs and Hugs tapestry from 2014 (nearly there!). If you’re a Twitter user you’ll find Genevieve as @MacSomerset if you’d like to keep up to date with her activities. She’s a busy lady!

Earlier this week she took a break from fundraising in Ilminster and came over to visit us to see the Coffee With Friends kits as she hadn’t yet seen one of the complete kits. While in our workshop she also picked up a payment that one of our dear customers, Hilmary, has made as her family’s personal donation to Macmillan Cancer Support.

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And here’s Hilmary, pictured on a visit to Jolly Red’s hideaway earlier this year. She and husband David are holding a calendar given to us by another friend (aren’t we lucky!), Elisabeth. Hilmary’s family surname is associated with Vikings, so it was a source of some amusement that she and David visited us on March 31st – while the Viking page was open. What a coincidence!

With Hilmary’s donation, that’ll bring the total of this month’s Macmillan payment to over £267.00. A big thank you to Hilmary and family both for buying and stitching our kits, and for being the happy recipients of the finished cushions.

Hilmary is currently stitching her way through five Coffee With Friends tapestries. Two down, three to go!

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Meanwhile, there’s been some super fast Coffee With Friends stitching by Valerie! Valerie’s Coffee With Friends kit arrived on a Monday and by Thursday of the same week she was in the car, on her way to Somerset to drop her completed canvas in for our Making Up Service. How’s that for speedy!

Valerie and her local group of stitchers normally work on canvases with elaborate stitches, huge varieties of threads, and lots of colour changes. We imagine that on this occasion stitching only in tent stitch must have presented its own kind of challenge. When we discussed it with Valerie, she said that the self-imposed time restraint really helped her to stay focused – and it meant that she didn’t have time to experiment with other stitches and threads!

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Valerie intends to raffle her finished cushion when her stitching group holds their own coffee morning fundraiser. We wish them all the best. Please keep us posted, Valerie and friends!

Over to you! We’d love to see what you’re doing, whether you’re going to a local Coffee Morning today or over the weekend, or are organising  your own fundraising for Macmillan.

Perhaps you’ve already started stitching your Coffee With Friends tapestry? Please do post pictures on our Facebook page, tweet them to us @mrsjollyred, or email me at kelly@jollyred.co.uk.

Pictures of work in progress are so fantastic to see, and a source of inspiration for anyone yet to start their tapestry. We’ve created a Coffee With Friends album on Facebook and will keep updating with images. How exciting, and thank you Heather (on our Facebook page) for getting the ball rolling with the picture of her tapestry that she posted last night.

Have a lovely day, and a great weekend. And once again thank you so much for your support for a cause that is close to the hearts of so many of us.

Take care, and happy stitching. Have a lovely weekend of fun and friends,

Kelly

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