How to Give a Little Bit More

Did you know that you can boost the value of your charity shop donations by allowing the charity to claim an additional 28% on top of the sale price in the form of gift aid?

More and more of the charity shops on our high streets are now offering the opportunity to gift aid your donations, including Sue Ryder, Oxfam, British Heart Foundation and Help the Aged. New rules starting last month mean that the charity shops no longer have to send lots of letters to seek our permission to claim the gift aid. Providing the value of the sale of the donations does not exceed a set amount, they can claim it directly, making it easy to give a little bit more.

I took my latest donations into our local Cancer Research and they gave me a very short form to fill in and a card to bring with me when I donate. To make the process even easier, they even gave me some pre-filled stickers, so all I had to do next time I donated was affix it to the bag.

It always feels good to donate to charity, but now it's just that little bit better (I like to think even more so when the donation is made in a bag with a topless David Beckham on!)

Giving to Charity

I have been feeling very inspired this week by a thrifty mrs' post what not to donate to charity shops. It's very tempting to sell everything you no longer need on eBay for a bit of cash, but it's important not to forget charity too!

This week I gave a dress and a pair of shoes to the charity shop:

And even though it's only a small donation, at least it's something. I detect a slight warm and fuzzy glow...

Music Magpie

This weekend was a big stuff sorting/clearing out weekend as we prepare for the arrival of yet more samba drums to fill our house up (Dave runs a samba drumming business Ola Samba and we're starting a new community group- Ciren Samba for which we will be acquiring yet more drums!)

We gave some furniture away on Freegle and a couple of bags to the charity shop. I also tried out Music Magpie- a site which allows you to input the barcodes of any CDs/DVDs/games you no longer want and then gives you a price for them and a freepost label to send them away. You can then elect to give the money to charity, convert into M&S vouchers to spend online or receive a cheque. It was really simple to do, although I couldn't get the webcam barcode reader to work so input them manually and although you don't get much for your CDs, I'm just glad to have some more space.

Now I just need to find a box to fit them all into and wait for my £12.92 to arrive!

Bunting Birthday Cards

We've been having a New Year's clearout and I've promised to cut down my boxes and boxes of 'craft stuff', so I thought I'd make a start with Birthday cards. I got out lots of leftover scraps of tissue paper, sugar paper and wrapping paper:

I then cut out lots of little triangles from the paper and grouped them together into similar colours to make bunting:

This was a lot of fun and once the triangles were cut out, it was really quick to glue them on and draw the 'string' and I think the overall effect is quite cute. Just a shame I chose a design that barely used up any of the craft stuff!

Now I've done this, it's making me think about a cloth bunting project... watch this space!

Craft Space Clear Out

We have now put up our Christmas tree, after much debate about where we could fit a 7ft tree in our little lodge (the answer is in the middle of the floor, blocking both the window and the radiator!)

What with the Christmas tree and all of the craft materials strewn around in a last minute gift-making panic, there's barely room for us in the house, so tonight, drastic measures were taken and I began the difficult process of parting with my lecture notes to make room...

Goodbye first year!