Like a lot of people out there, we’re already looking forward to this year’s Great British Tea Party – and one of the people who makes it all happen is our friend Marie at the Wallace & Gromit’s Children’s Foundation. Not only is she busy getting ready for the Great British Tea Party, but she’s organising Wrong Trousers Day too. In fact, she’s already been out having some fun with our favourite characters.

If you’d like to support Marie and the lovely people at the Wallace & Gromit Children’s Foundation, join Wallace & Gromit’s Wrong Trousers Day on Friday 25^th June and help sick children in the UK by registering here.

Here’s something we’ve not mentioned before on the blog: our recycling pirate, Captain Rummage.

Captain Rummage at Buckingham Palace

No, we’re not making it up. Here at Taylors we really do have a recycling pirate. And he really is called Captain Rummage. (Although his friends know him as Chris to be fair.)

In fact, he’s now our ‘award-winning’ recycling pirate. Thanks to him, Taylors scooped gold at the prestigious Food and Drink Federation Community Partnership Awards in the Environment Category.

Oh yes, and he also received an MBE last year. He had to go down to Buckingham Palace so that Prince Charles could present him with.

But at the heart of it all is our community recycling project, the Cone Exchange, where Chris works with various different social groups in our local area to ‘turn trash into treasure’.

It started over a decade ago, when Chris was giving a group of adults with special needs a tour of our factory. One visitor spotted a pile of cardboard cones in our waste bins – leftovers from the big rolls of string we use for tagged teabags. They asked to take some away to make ‘Christmas angels’ out of.

The cones that started it all…

This started a trend and before you knew it, loads of people were making decorations out of our old cones, then selling them with the help of neighbourhood shops.

The whole thing was a big hit – it cut down on our rubbish, raised money for charity and brought the whole community a bit closer together. Unsurprisingly, Chris was hooked.

He started finding more and more ways to recycle things we once threw away – from reusing waste that as craft materials to collecting old phones and ink cartridges for charities like Oxfam – making contact with more and more local people and groups who wanted to be involved along the way.

Soon he needed a base to store all the stuff he was collecting and trading, and the Cone Exchange was born – our tribute to the Corn Exchanges of olden times.

Chris also began visiting local schools to encourage them to help and he took to dressing up as the pirate Captain Rummage to capture their imagination… or possibly just so he could wear fancy dress.

But why a pirate?

Well, it could be about the hunt for treasure amongst the trash. Or maybe it’s to do with his ‘reduce, reuse and recycle’ mantra – otherwise known as the three ‘arrrs’!

Since the beginning of the cricket season, we’ve been running a competition with All Out Cricket magazine to find their Tea Lady of the Year – highlighting the hard work of tea ladies up and down the land, and giving credit to the nation’s caterers.

And now we have a winner!

That’s Lynne on the left with our Liz

All Out Cricket received lots of top notch nominations, but it was Lynne Wagstaff at Mickleover CC who ‘took the biscuit’. She stood out for ‘the sheer range of her teatime spread’ and even puts on a dessert table, as well as homemade birthday cakes for players.

Lynne’s prize was a treat-filled weekend in Harrogate, so while she was in the neighbourhood we couldn’t resist popping down to say congratulations in person.

If you know a tea lady who really bowls people over, please get in touch!

This week we’ve been playing in the garden.

Not our garden, though – the rather more impressive RHS garden at Harlow Carr. It’s just a few miles away from us on the other side of Harrogate.

We teamed up with the lovely RHS people for their Family Fortnight by putting on a special activity day for kids. The idea was to raise awareness for our Yorkshire Rainforest Project, but to do it in a way that would be fun for the little ones.

Outside in the garden for alfresco art…

So we put on a bit of craft workshop, with kids making wings to turn themselves into butterflies and parrots, as well as making rainforest tree ’shakers’ and tribal jewellery. Through our community project the Cone Exchange, we already collect waste card and other things from our factory for local schools to re-use as craft materials, so there were all sorts of bits and bobs on hand for them to use.

All in all the day was really successful with several hundred children and their parents popping in to enjoy themselves over the course of the day – and hopefully we’ve helped them to better understand why the rainforest is quite so important too.

…and inside the ‘yurt’ making tree shakers