What is St Luke's Hospice?

St Luke's is a hospice which cares for people aged 18 and above throughout Sheffield who have incurable illnesses. Their aim is always to control the patients symptoms, alleviate pain, and give them the best possible quality of life – all free of charge. It costs £6 million per annum to keep St Luke's open, and government funding, via NHS trusts only provides one third of the funds required, which means the Hospice has to raise a staggering £4 million each year to provide this vital end-of-life care.

This challenge was set up by a St Luke's Supporter who has seen first hand, the amazing care given to patients through St Luke's and whilst donations are now closed we would like to thank all our donators for their wonderful contributions.

Monday 11 June 2012

Quick Update

It's been a pretty long, pretty wet and very windy weekend - so sorry if you've been waiting for an update on yesterday's fair.  I'm afraid there wasn't a whole lot to share so I didn't feel like rushing to blog about it this morning.

As I feared - the weather here was pretty dreadful - no torrential rain (we got that tonight instead!) but lots of short sharp showers and really gusty wind all day.  That gave us problems as we couldn't get the gazebo up and couldn't display the cards in the normal way as they would have blown away so lots spent their time in boxes.  We ended up outside, at the back of the church where this years fair was, on a market stall next door to the vintage fairground organ (6 hours of tunes like floral dance, delilah and congratulations at about 500 decibels did little to cheer us up!) and unfortunately many of other stalls back there were either moved (food stalls were moved into the cafe within the first hour) or sold out within the first 2 hours of the fair, which meant that few people seemed to find us.  We made a pretty paltry £96, which considering we were open for 2 hours longer than last year when we made £125 was quite disappointing - it was just a pity we weren't up front with the rest of the stalls.

Here's a couple of pics - nothing exciting - but the shot of stall was taken while we were open - we weren't exactly rushed of our feet...........   (we had some other "non blog donated" cards on our stall too which were kept separate from our sales- we raised an extra £12 from those but I won't add that to our total)


This is the delightful fairground organ (it was on the pitch next door to us!)  I should have taken video so you could all have shared in the joy of it's music too - one song was great - by song 130 we never want to hear an organ again!!!


Hopefully the weather will improve for the next fair - and the total with it!

Thanks again for everyone's support.

Tara

11 comments:

  1. Oh Tara what a great shame..but £96 is better than nothing...hopefully for the next fair it will be beautiful weather and it will bring people out..I must admit it was so cold here at one point yesterday we popped the heating on in JUNE!!!.

    Anne

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  2. well done you for sticking with it and as Anne says £96 is better than none. Here's to summer and more success next time. Zx

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  3. Tara you have my sympathies - I did a stall last week and had almost identical problems that you had - the difference being I was next to a plate smashing stall! Well done for raising the £96 I didn't even manage half that - Jacqueline xx

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  4. Well done girls, you all deserve a medal for your stoicism in lasting as long as you did. I do feel your disappointment in the grand total, but heads held high and look forward to better fare (fair) days. Cazro

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  5. Oh Tara it sounds as if you had a miserable day and it makes me feel cross because you are doing such a worthwhile thing here. I think under the circumstances £96 was a great result but I can understand that you're disappointed. Fingers crossed for the 23rd when I hope sales will sky-rocket!

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  6. you're a superhero for sticking it out! Roll on the next one, then you can banish all memories of this one! M x

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  7. Well done for enduring a horrible day. Hope the next fair coincides with some better weather. The weather really does make a difference doesn't it? Hopefully it'll be quieter next time too!

    Kat xx

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  8. Hola Tara, the weather can be a great enemy, i hope a good weather for the next fair and 96£ with this horrible day...my friend it was a good day.
    i would like to send you the middle of our sun, but now only i can send you a warm hug and... cheer up!

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  9. I'm sorry that your fair was such a disappointment after you had put in so much work.

    Would it not be possible to sell your cards through the Hospice shop/s. It seems as though you will have to have a lot of fairs to sell nearly two thousand cards.

    I am glad to see you are getting so much support from the card makers out there.

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  10. Oh Tara - what an awful disappointment for you after all the hard work. It's definitely the weather's fault! Let's hope the weather is fairer for the next one.

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  11. Aww . . . such a lot of hard work (and probably a headached from the organ grinding) but £96 is NEARLY £100 and I'm sure it will all help.

    Good luck for the tomorrow's fair . . . sending you some positive vibes for good weather and lots of customers.
    Hugs,
    Sarn xxx

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