Clare's Rebel Badge Blog

I completed my Bronze Maverick Award this month - very exciting, and I feel I should share my adventure with you.  My Community For this I ran a Warhammer Club after school for Secondary School students with an interest in the hobby. I have been doing this for some years with a fellow Rebel, but this year decided that the club needed to be more structured and the kids needed to be given a focus and more responsibility. To this end we created the 'Council of Doom' for the older students so that they had a say in how the club was run, and took responsibility for teaching new and less experienced students about the joys of Warhammer. This worked well until they had to go to revision classes instead. However, younger students took up the mantle of responsibility and organised our resources cupboard to a degree I am incapable of, and continued building our 'Age of Sigmar' army in readiness for the Armies on Parade competition in the autumn. I also started volunteering for my...

I believe that private gardens and public spaces should be havens for wildlife, as well as being pleasant for humans, with imperfect lawns containing patches of long grass and wildflowers, weeds in the borders and between the cracks in the patio. So many gardens are sterile and clean, perhaps for convenience; I understand this - people are busy and don't want their kids or pets getting muddy and making a mess, don't necessarily have the skills to maintain a garden or think that these skills are not for them or something they could not learn. I realise that this is a gross generalisation! I trained as a horticulturalist and landscaper many years ago, so have the confidence and skills to grow my garden and know why some things work and others don't. I have been fascinated by nature for most of my life, and still get excited when I see spiders or slow worms, or snakes, or frogs or eagles! I'm rather fond of ants and woodlice too, but slugs are my horticultural nemesis. How...

Work on the Christmas Badge continues, and I have completed making the origami Advent calendar: a set of 24 origami boxes each large enough to hold at least two sweets, and individually numbered. This is to replace one I made for my daughter 15 years ago, which is now a bit small. The important thing about an Advent Calendar for her is that it holds plenty of sweets! I have worked on my Maverick Award by participating in the latest lesson of my online Islamic geometry course for the My Skills section, and made a lovely pattern, although I need to rethink how I colour it. There are many ways of varying this pattern, so that will be an exercise to do when I have a little more time. This weekend is being spent having an off-Island adventure with a friend for the My Adventure part of Maverick. We have had a lovely time visiting a big Christmas market, driving through the New Forest, and buying things that make us go 'OOOH! Shiny!'. And cheese. Lots of cheese...