THE LOZENGE....the basic building block of our craft

Last night, once the kids had gone to bed, I set myself up on my patio, armed with all the bottles we’ve collected so far, my wife’s kitchen scissors, my mp3 player and a bottle or two of beer.

The idea is to turn the bottles into lozenges (for want of a better name) using 2 complete bottles base to base with another (usually one of the crunched or capless ones) cut up as a sleeve to hold them together. Giving us a cap at each end for fixing.

It was gone midnight by the time I dragged a tarpaulin over what I’d done and went to bed.
This is what greeted Paul (one of my fellow wombles) in the morning when he came round.

The bottles in the picture are laid out ‘roughly’ as we want them, the piles are 10 feet long which is the maximum allowed length.
As you can see, we still need a few more bottles for the far pontoon.

'Gift Aid' it

As I said before, we're not just doing this for fun, we're asking you dear readers to sponsor us too.
Because we're fundraising for the NAS we can use their official sponsor forms...and they have gift aid.
This is brilliant!!  it means that we can get an extra 28p from the government for every £1 donated.
Provided the sponsor is a british tax payer, fills in their details and most importantly ticks the 'gift aid' box on the sponsor form.
Please, when you see the sponsor forms, think about ticking that box.  It costs you nothing but can make a big difference to our charity.

Thank you.

Bottles....bottles....and MORE bottles

We've decided to build our raft out of 2L fizzy pop bottles. Mad?   Probably, yes!!!

There is a reasoning behind it, because we're wombles, we want to use as much recycled material as possible.
And, because there are other teams out there building rafts, I reckon there won't be a spare 5 gallon drum left in the whole of Chippenham!!!

How many 2 litre bottles get dropped off at the recycling centre every day?...all we have to do is intercept them before they get there.
So....the appeal went out on Freegle.  and the bottles started coming in by the bin bag full!!!

A little about us and what we're all about...

The Westlea Wombles are 4 friends who work together in the Planned Maintenance department of Westlea Housing association.
We wanted to raise funds for the newly formed North Wiltshire branch of the National Autistic Society (formerly the North Wilts ASD Support Group) and thought entering the Chippenham River Festival Raft Race would be a fun way to do it.
This will be a diary of our journey....