Today we were involved in an international women’s day event that merged women led local community groups with an upcycling event focused on ladies clothing!

This idea was the brain child of Tirza from Slough Anti Litter group supported by Riffat and Clarissa from The Slough Bid; Rosa from Together As One (and GoodGym); Sbba from Asian Star Radio and Knit your socks off; Samina from Sakoon through Cancer and Knit your socks off; Bep from Thrive365; Claire from I Got Style and of course us!

Each group had a host of volunteers supporting the event from set up to swap shop to manning stalls to panel interviews to decant! Well done to all the team members. Great unity!

Need some hanger management?

So we started the day by helping to hang up already donated items. Sut was already on it by the time I arrived. So I hanged around letting her get on with it.

We soon had a few rails already to go and dressed to impress! Just needed customers now.

Has that cardi-gone?

So what is a swap shop? It’s an up recycling event whereby you can select up to 10 items to donate, pay a donation fee, bring in your clothes to the swap assistants (us), and collect tokens for the value of your items which can then be used against other donated items!

We had a tight slot of 30 minutes to receive the swap items, code them to a value (we had a Strava vs parkrun coding system going on so as to not offend anyone if we thought the value was lower (parkrun … sorry parkrun we love you really), or higher value items aka Strava! We then dished out the tokens for the customers to use against other clothes.

Dior to Dior sales

Although the event was a pre book event we didn’t want passerby’s to have FOMO so we had Agni out in the mall handing out flyers letting people know that they could come in too!

Purse-Shoe your Dreams

Whilst the swap assistants were busy sorting and hanging, there were workshops and panels interviews going on where some really insightful and heart warming stories were being shared… I loved that Anita loves red (we have a tshirt just waiting for her), Samina loves trainers (we know where you can use those!) and Claire’s advise on wearing a different colour each day next week might just be my challenge (I’m sure I have race t-shirts in every colour of the rainbow).

Even The Mayor Amjad Abassi and local MP Tan Dhesi came along to support the event.

Really positive feedback from the customers with loads being ‘bought’ during the swap shop opening time.

Thank you to the team for getting involved.

I had great eggs-pectations from the team tonight and they didn’t let me down!

We had a nice chilled out task today of filling knitted chicks with eggs for Alexander Devine Hospice and their Big Chick Knit campaign. We needed a nice warm indoor space to do this task and very kindly Clare offered her venue at Stoke Park Trust and as a bonus she invited some of her team to join us.. winner winner chicken dinner!

We are as chick as thieves and wanted to get started on the task as quickly as possible but before we could do that we had to do a warm up of course! So with a nice gentle warm up of walking to lunging to arm swinging we were egg-cited to start.

We had the best table to work on too! One covered in egg like balls also known as a pool table!

Working around the cluck

You better watch your behavior or you’ll get eggs-pelled from the group - actually that would never happen so we worked extra hard to be naughty! Each chick was given a name … egg-stra challenge was that it had to start with D (for duck!… because they looked more like ducks!)

The names started off easily enough… we had a Derek, a Doug and a Dickie… we then went deep to our roots and chose names from our cultures (or near enough)… so we had Punjabi ducks called Davinder and Daljeet, Iranian duck called Darius, Irish duck called Darragh, Bengali ducks called Devajani, Muslim ducks called Daniel and good old British ducks called Dave!

We worked slowly but surely and soon had all the chicks (aka ducks) filled so it was time for the fitness fun to begin.

Best of cluck!

In pairs we worked around the room working on 4 exercises from agility ladder to med ball halos to lat pull downs and overhead raises..

Followed by a good old party game of musical chairs!

Well done to Hamid for being the ‘Champion’

Thank you all for getting involved in tonight’s task.

Next week we are at St Mary’s Church on Church St helping with a spring clean (meet up point is Upton Court park at 6:30pm)

4 goodgymers helped May sort out Summer colours with our creative Maya she helped us put them in the right shades.

The team managed to sort around 10 bags of clothing with plenty mote arriving, Helen found a great Fat Face item and Sut/Maya went for the swim selection.

Thank you for help!

More dates to follow shorlty.