St Mary's Church Rickmansworth, holds a special place in the hearts and minds of many of our members, and to record our presence at Remembrance and also in the annual Christmas Tree festival, here are some of our contributions;
2025 - Christmas Tree Festival
Lengths of pallet wood were cut into about 1.5 cm wide sticks and laid out next to each other. The longest one was put to one side, and the next one trimmed by 1 cm; the next, 2 cm, and so on until the last one was 3 cm long. Each stick was then drilled 3 mm in the centre, to take the legth of 12 swg garden wire as the spine. The assempled "tree" was then suspended from the base section of an RBL standard; removed, the wall bracket strengthened, and replaced.
The lorry poppy at the top was liberated from a street sign post that had been missed being taken down after Remembrance; the RBL poppies were donated by the Branch and the crochetted poppies were recycled from our Remembrance display this year. The coloured discs ("baubles") had QR codes that direct the curious to the AKA Truce, Mercy Dogs, Charlie Brown and Captain Robert Campell; those links are available in this text.
2025 Remembrance
The 2 m x 1.6 m poppy was made by looping 2 lengths of 8 mm water tubing together, overlapping just enough to fix the black centre to. The red material was formed by cutting a discarded bedsheet to shape, forming a hem to take those tubes, and dying. A length of 12 swg garden wire provides support from the an 8mm bolt through a loop in the wire which rests between the central crennelations.
A spray of crochetted poppies to the top right, hot glued to a piece of garden mesh, suggest a wave of poppies are on their way.
2024 Christmas Tree Festival
A 2 m length of 8 mm plumbing tube was bent to half a circle and restrained with a piece of twisted sellotape to form the base. A short legth of 12 swg garden wire was formed into a 3 cm circle and a 2 cm circle. The smaller circle was used to mount the design 2 m off the ground and lengths of 50 mm brown fabric tape was fixed to one end of the tubing, passed through the 3 cm circle and back to the tubing repeatedly to form the tree.
Fairy lights and poppies were applied to finish the job.
2024 Remembrance
2 m lengths of slender saplings were zip tied together to form as near a 2.5 m diameter circle as was possible, and crochetted poppies applied using duck tape to the rear of the structure. This meant that, over the Remebrance period, quite a few poppies fell off..
2023 Remembrance
Using the artist's impression recorded under World Histories (here's the link), a polythene dust sheet was stretched across a pair of 2.2 m lengths of rough wood, and below a cross beam. A football was inflated and painted brown to lie to the right and a 2 dimensional Christmas tree fashioned from pallet wood, decorated with field dressings, eye patches and poppies, completed the scene to the left, and lit from behind by a low powered lamp.
2022 Christmas Tree Festival
Modesty forbids explanation for this one.
2022 Remembrance
"In Flanders Fields" - this piece reused much of the exhibit from June.
2022 - Anniversary of The Somme
Inspired by Cpt John Macrae's poem and the muddy fields of the Somme, this piece was formed by assembling a tray out of pallet wood; filling it with expanding foam; painting the top dark brown; inserting altar poppies and a few sticks in a random fashion; a full size mock up of his poem, traced by hand from a printed copy was stained with cold tea, dried, scrunched up and thrown away - just like the original. Retrieved, and pinned in place over a type B wreath, which was placed as though it was stuck in the oozing mud. The Wikipedea entry was printed on the reverse of the photo of Cpt Macrae, printed off several copies and placed in a pallet-wood box, for viewers to take away.
