Saturday 11th January was our first meeting of 2020 and we opened at 10am with the AGM.
The current committee was voted in for another year and the annual awards were made.

Bert presented Howard Overton with the Bill Alston Trophy for the highest number of points gained at the table top competition and Fred presented Bert with the Orchard Wood Turners trophy for the member who won most points without winning a turning of the month or highly commended certificate.
Alan received a voucher for his work in getting up early and preparing the hall for us each month.

When Paul gave us a rundown on the accounts for the year he pointed out that 2019 was the best year so far for the amount of money we have raised for charity. A very impressive £2,750. Since we started five years ago we have raised over £15,000 supporting McMillan Cancer research, Marie Curie cancer research, Blackthorn Trust, Sittingbourne branch of the MS society, Woodland Trust and the Royal Marsden Hospital cancer research dept.
I have probably missed out a couple but as you can see the causes are very close to the hearts of many of us.
Well done to everyone who has contributed time and effort to this.

The rest of the day was a club day and this time it Chris Withall on the big lathe making a very large segmented bowl and Keith Leonard was on one of the smaller lathes turning drop spindles.
Paul was showing how he made his templates for use with his airbrushing decorating on to turned pieces and also showing some airbrushing techniques but on to card. His tea light that he put on the competition table shows how it can look on a bowl.
Dawn also had a pyrography session for anybody who wanted a go.

Luckily there isn’t any more to say about the day so it leaves me room to put the photos in because again we had a lot of table top competition entries.

Our next meeting is on Saturday 8th February and we have ED Oliver with us again. He came to us at the last minute last November and his two likes were chunky where chunky suited the type of wood he was using and very artistic when it came to colouring etc. So what else is up his sleeve? Come along and find out. It’s bums on seats that pays his bill.

Don’t forget that the club annual dinner is at the Fruiterers Arms on Saturday 22nd February and Dawn would LOVE to have some volunteers to help out at the scout taster session on Saturday 7th March. Please help if you possibly can.

Graham