I'm going on a trip to a massive trade fair in Dubai in a few weeks. I was talking about it with my friend Anne and she told me about the rather odd obsession that the city has with Tea Pots.
I was sent some pictures of the gigantic tea pots that they have in Dubai. It seems like a pretty wacky place, I'm looking forward to go on a little drive around the roundabouts there....
I have today been spending a bit of time watching the amazing talks and lectures you will find on the 'Do Lectures' site. The speakers include the inventor Trevor Bayliss, author and bread expert Andrew Whitley and Guy Watson of the Riverford Organic box scheme.
The idea behind the event is that 'People who DO things can inspire others to DO things'. Every year, the event invites DOers from business, the arts, campaigning, inventing and so on to share their stories and give insight about what inspires them, what motivates them and why they do what they do.
The event is sponsored by the wonderful Howies company, who produce a great collection of ethical clothing.
David Hieatt, co-founder of the event says "When you listen to their stories, they just light a fire in your belly to go and Do your thing, your passion, the thing that sits in the back your head each day, just waiting, and waiting for you to follow your heart.
To go find your cause to fight for, your company to go start, your invention to invent, your book to write, your mountain to climb."
The event takes place in West Wales and all of the 60 delegates camp out over the course of the days. For more information, check out the website.
A Quarter Of... is a website that hosts an incredible selection of sweets and candies from years gone buy. Like an old-fashioned sweet shop on the web.
You can buy cherry lips, sweet tobacco, Black Jacks and Space Dust. All the sweets you remember growing up with but that, sadly, aren't around any more.
You should check them out here if you fancy reminding yourself of the playground.
The SuperJam Tea Parties featured on The Five Thirty Show...
At our most recenttea party for the elderly, our guests enjoyed the company of a TV camera from STV, filming a feature about the Tea Parties project for the Five Thirty Show.
We've now hosted well over 100 Tea Parties all over the country and there were over 110 elderly guests at last week's Tea Party, at Meadowbank Sports Centre in Edinburgh.
You can watch the feature here, which was broadcast today, 27th January.
We've got a lot of Tea Parties planned for the coming months and the whole project is just growing and growing. The events are very well received by the elderly guests and, for some of them, it is the highlight of their week.
If you would like to get involved, click here to visit our Facebook group.
Tomorrow, Tuesday 27th January, at 9.30am on Channel 4 there is a repeat of the 'Tricky Business' documentary that followed the development of SuperJam for 6 months. You can watch the documentary online here.
It was an amazing and sometimes surreal experience being followed around by the film crew. Having them follow my progress definitely helped to motivate me to pursue my ideas and turn the SuperJam idea into a reality.
In this program, you can watch the ups and downs of setting up the business, finding a manufacturing facility, raising finance and the challenges we had coming up with label designs that everyone were happy with.
Every SuperJam fan who signs up to our monthly email newsletter/gang before the end of March will be entered into a competition to win a year's supply of SuperJam, which is a selection of 52 jars. You can sign up using the little box on the homepage here.
Quite a lot of people have been emailing about this since we have an advert running in a lot of newspapers (about 3 million), which says you will be entered into the competition if you join the gang on the website - but, until now, it doesn't say anything about this on the website.
Our newsletter is very popular and read by thousands of SuperJam fans. I write about what's going on with SuperJam, our ideas for the future and add in a few articles about quirky things i've come across or funny stories from the month.
Of course, jam and toast is the ultimate breakfast, mid morning snack or treat before bed. It is a partnership made in heaven, like Mulder & Scully, Bill & Ben, Postman Pat and his Cat..
Anyway, I was recently leisurely browsing the history of the electric toaster, which is, as you would imagine, a frequent pastime of mine. I came across a website in America that hosts an impressive collection of toasters from throughout the century or so this marvellous contraption has been in existence. You might remember that I posted before about toasters.
The picture above is of a General Electric Toaster, circa 1910, which is the first ever commercially available model. It looks pretty different to what we imagine as a toaster today and, I hate to say, quite dangerous. An original working General Electric Toaster will cost you about £500. I think I can probably live without one for now.
If you are, like me, interested in the history of the toaster, you can check out Toaster Central.
You may have seen this film in cinemas last year. It is about a group of elderly people in Northampton, Massachusetts, who have formed a rock band. They have a combined age of over 2,000 years.
They have grown in popularity so much over the past few years, especially after a film was made about their story, that they play to sell-out crowds all over the world.
MSNBC Says:
"Some of what they sing shouts the honest part of growing old. Their concerts are intelligent and deep. Ninety minutes nonstop, constantly shifting from laughter to tears.
"Nothing to do and nowhere to go,” they croon. “I want to be sedated."
It took standing ovations for director Bob Cilman to convince the chorus to sing the songs they used to tell their kids to turn down."
This is, of course, similar to the story of the British group 'The Zimmers', who shot to fame last year following the release of their single 'My Generation'.
These stories are inspirational because they demonstrate that, regardless of how old you are, you can still be entertaining, funny and try to improve how other people are perceived and treated in society.
Of course, through The SuperJam Tea Parties, I hope that we are able to bring fun and motivation to the lives of thousands of elderly people who are living alone, are housebound or who live in care.
Click one of the tabs below for more articles like this:
The awards, in their third year, were created by BT Business to celebrate the achievements of various entrepreneurs who have challenged the status quo in their industries. The competition was judged by Peter Jones, of Dragons' Den fame and James Hurley, editor of Growing Business Magazine, among others.
The prize for the award was a photo shoot with the renowned photographer Rankin, famous for his images for the Dove 'Real Women' campaign, the Queen and Kylie Minogue. It was a pretty fun day having my picture taken. I can honestly say that it was the first time I've ever worn make-up...
The overall winner of the competition, crowned 'Most Outstanding Entrepreneur' was Mike Welch, who is a very nice chap indeed. He runs BlackCircles.com, the biggest online retailer of car tires on the internet in the UK.
The photographs taken by Rankin of all of the winners will be exhibited at gallery@oxo in London's South Bank, starting from next Thursday, 29th January. Entry to the exhibition is free and definitely worth a look, the stories of all of the winners are fascinating.
Today, I signed up to a pretty cool website. I thought i'd post about it since it is similar to SuperJam in its approach to health, super foods and good packaging design.
Graze is an online subscription service, created by the founder of LoveFilm. You can sign up for relatively little cost to have healthy, natural snacks delivered to your desk or home once a week or even every day.
The boxes come with nuts, dried fruit and various other things. You can actually sign up for a free trial on their website. They will send you a box of snacks for free, which is rather generous of them.
I'd say it is a business to watch over the coming year, I think their concept will be very popular. I wonder if people would subscribe to have their jam delivered every week?
I've been a bit lazy with the 'Tea Cosy of The Week' contest over the past few weeks and haven't awarded any for a while.
However, this tea cosy is just so wonderful that I had to put it onto the blog. The amount of work involved in making a tea cosy as complicated as this is undoubtedly huge.
We get sent a lot of tea cosies for The SuperJam Tea Parties project and the elderly guests at the events really enjoy admiring them.
Feel free to send in your own hand knitted creation. If it is particularly good, i'll feature it on the blog and send you some jam!
Blueberries improve your memory (if you're a rat, anyway.)
As you know, we use Super Fruits in our SuperJams, such as blueberries and cranberries.
This is because they contain particularly high levels of vitamins and antioxidants. I'm often reading articles about these amazing fruits and came across a particularly interesting one in a recent edition of New Scientist (you can read it here). I've been meaning to post about it for a while, but kept forgetting.
A scientist called James Joseph from Tufts University in Boston was studying antioxidant-rich foods like strawberries, spinach and blueberries. Antioxidants reverse some memory loss linked to old age, probably by mopping up free radicals in the brain.
For eight weeks, Joseph fed supplements of strawberries, spinach or blueberries to three groups of 19-month-old rats; the equivalent of 60 to 65 years old for humans. He then assessed their memories and mobility with a number of standard tests.
All the rats showed improvements in memory compared with rats that were not given antioxidant-rich food to eat. Surprisingly, the rats fed with blueberries also had better balance and coordination in tasks such as running along a rod.
The whole article is here, if you fancy reading more.
Winners of The SuperJam Tea Parties Knit-a-thon Announced!
As you know, as part of the hundreds of SuperJam Tea parties for the elderly that we have been running over the past six months, we organised a massive 'knitathon'.
The guests at each of the tea parties all over the country were invited to knit squares, with the group who knitted the most winning a massive hamper of luxury chocolates from our very generous friends at Kschocolat.
All of the thousands of squares have been sewn together to make blankets for an orphanage in India. There are now enough beautiful hand knitted blankets for every single child at the Gwalior Orphanage for disabled children to have one each. We've even been sent some knitted jumpers, teddies and a couple of extra tea cosies for our ongoing 'Tea Cosy of The Week' competition.
The winning group was headed by Audrey Hughes in North Wales, who knitted an incredible 346 squares!
I was recently invited to Palm Springs, California, for the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of The Year Awards.
The whole event was an incredible experience, with the best entrepreneurs from all manner of industries being recognised for the steps that they had taken to build amazing businesses, supplying ground-breaking products and creating thousands of jobs.
I met some very inspirational people who gave me some great advice and helped motivate me to take the next steps in growing SuperJam.
At the event, I was grabbed by Diane Brady, the Senior Editor of the massive Business Week Magazine, and fellow Scot, for a quick interview.
As part of our ongoing SuperJam Tea Parties project, we helped to put together a big event at Queen Margaret University, with the afternoon hosted by the international students society.
The guests enjoyed hearing about the diverse range of countries that the students all came from and learning about how life and culture is so much different elsewhere. Everyone also took part in a countries quiz, to see who was paying attention!
Of course, there were plenty of scones and SuperJam and lots of laughter. Our next SuperJam Tea Party is this Thursday, 15th January, at Meadowbank Sports Centre in Edinburgh, from 2pm-4pm - feel free to come along to give us a hand making the teas!
This week, we added a new supermarket to our list of outlets...
Booths have been around since 1847 and have twenty-six high quality stores in the North West of England (Cumbria, Cheshire, Lancashire and Yorkshire). They are famed for supplying the best food and drink from the local area and from father afield.
We now supply well over a thousand outlets across the UK and we're sure that the products will go down well in Booth's stores.
If you are a customer of Booth's, we will be handing out samples in all of their stores over the coming months so keep your eyes peeled and be sure to say hello!
How to make a Jet Engine from your used SuperJam jar!
Make Magazine produce weekly online video project guides, providing instructions on how to create various gadgets and experiments from household objects. I love watching the videos and the things these guys make are usually pretty useless but very fun.
To celebrate the 1st anniversary of their 'Weekend Projects' series, they decided to build a jet using a jam jar.
Since it was in some way relevant to jam (but overall just very cool), I thought i'd post it on the blog. You can check out the video here.
I'm going on a trip to a massive trade fair in Dubai in a few weeks. I was talking about it with my friend Anne and she told me about the rather odd obsession that the city has with Tea Pots.
