It has crept up upon us pretty quickly this year it seems … first daylight savings this weekend, and then Easter next weekend. And this year Easter marks the start of the school holidays.

Our Centre will be closed for this period. We reopen after ANZAC Day, on Wednesday 26 April.

We hope you have a lovely holiday yourself and get to eat some chocolate eggs and hot cross buns (like we did at Morning Tea on Friday - it felt quite festive!).

See you in Term 2.

If you came along to the Alphington Open Studios in December last year you would have seen some beautiful timber chopping boards in the gallery.

Lovely local artist Jane Hausseger has offered to share her skills and knowledge about working with timber in our upcoming Recycled Timber Design Workshop running on 6 May from 10am-12pm, here at ACC in the Community Shed.

Jane will teach you how to make coffee paddles - small chopping boards - that can be used to serve food or coffee and would make lovely handmade gifts. In the workshop you will learn about selecting recycled timber, cutting, sanding and dressing the timber with products that are suitable for food use.

It is a great introduction to recycling timber and you will walk away with a lovely product at the end. You can book in here.

Coming up in May, we have another really interesting workshop called Pillow Talk, led by local artist Annie Bolitho running here at ACC. This workshop has a strong sustainability theme and is supported with a sustainability grant from the City of Yarra.

Annie is creatively working to find a second life for the cotton fabric that covers pillows.

So … if you have:

• pillows that have reached the end of their usable life, and/or

• an interest in learning how to go about eco-dyeing and/or

• an interest in reducing landfill

this workshop is for you!

Join Annie here on at ACC in the Community Shed on Saturday 13 May from 2-4pm. With supportive funding from City of Yarra this workshop costs only $20 and is suitable for tweens, teenagers and adults (it would be a good one to do as a family). Have fun dipping, bashing, rolling and steaming colours. And learn how the pillow production and waste stream works. Book in here.

We now have a defibrillator at ACC. It will be mounted on the wall outside the office (we think - we’ll post the exact location when it is installed - but it will definitely be out somewhere accessible) and will be available anytime 24/7 for community use. So, if you have an emergency make a mental note … just in case.

If you need to use it (and we hope you don’t of course) it is fully automated, you just turn it on and follow the instructions …

Kalimna is away for two weeks leading up to the Easter holidays (her family are off to Japan for 3 weeks or so - lucky things) and so I (Leanne) will be struggling along in the office by myself - missing her organisational skills!

And as I recover from the Alphington Show you may need to have some patience with me!

In the next two weeks we’ll be wrapping things up for term 1 (AAA Bowls finished last week and Women in the Shed finishes this week) and getting everything bedded down for term 2.

Our last Morning Tea in the Garden is this coming Friday at 11.30am as the following Friday is Good Friday … come along for some Easter fare - hot cross buns and Easter Eggs are on the menu!

And you might notice that we have some lovely new chandaliers decorating our outdoor seating area - thanks to the creativity of our Friday afternooon AAA Arts group. Here’s a photo of Corrado putiting them up.