The last meeting of the year and we had a club day with once again a good turnout and plenty of pieces to show. As well as the club big lathe we had two other small lathes and Geoff Horsfield also brought his own lathe in.

Another chance for us to wander round to see what other people were doing or just chat about whatever came to mind.

Geoff was turning necklaces and Fred was preparing small logs for the afternoon speed turning competition. Chris Withall was turning bases for oil burning incense lamps and Paul was on one of the small lathes finishing a top for a pepper mill. Later he was to be found hand carving some decoration onto a laburnum vase he had made earlier!

Steve was on the big lathe for some of the time and was turning a large box. At speed. No mucking about there. Top speed or stop. Controlled of course.

The speed turning competition was to turn a snow man to resemble one that Fred had made. The results were interesting to say the least and I say no more, mainly because mine was probably the least like the sample out of them all!!

Steve won the trophy with Nick Adamec and Keith Leonard close runners up.

Our next meeting is on Saturday 12th January 2014 and the first item on the agenda is the AGM.
The most important item will be the election of the committee for 2014. All offices are open for selection and if you feel changes are needed now is the time to do it.
We really need two new members just to bring us up to the number we should have.
One on a temporary basis because Matthew will be away sailing ships off the coast of New Zealand again until around April.

We have a full programme as you know but we need someone to confirm with the demonstrator a week or so before the meeting that he is still ok to be with us.

We don’t often get let down but it has happened in the past. Paul Hunt has taken on the treasurer’s job as well as backing up Matthew on events but we never replaced Roger Martin when he resigned from the committee so we have a vacant seat to fill, ideally to take over the events that Paul organises. So how about it?

Let’s see a few hands in the air rather than tucked neatly under bums. If you want to nominate someone you must get their consent first.

Back to the meeting and when we have finished all AGM business we have secured a lady named Coral Davies who is a pyrographer.
We tried for Romy Jones but she will be floating around somewhere in the Norwegian Fjordes in January.

The club annual dinner price has been announced and it works out at £24 per person. The club social fund will cover the cost of gratuities.

And finally. Although the event at Romney Marsh was not very well attended by Joe public we still managed to raise £77 for their charity. They want to make it a quarterly event which could be good but they need some help in organising it better. We might give them a hand with this because we can see that in the summer it could be a reasonable sales event even though the space is limited. Or maybe we can influence that as well!!

See you all at the AGM

Graham