Win a year in the Winnin Post club 2012-13

THE WINNIN POST CLUB is now taking members for 2012-13. Members receive Winn Sommor’s annual booklet of around 25 competitions in the summer plus prize quizzes in autumn and spring. With a limit of 250 members, your chances of a win are excellent, and the puzzles and quizzes are great fun.

To join the club, send a cheque for £13.00, made out to WINN SOMMOR, to

Winn Sommor,
The Winnin Post Club,
Dept JW,
Erica Handling House,
Tattershall,
Lincoln,
Lincolnshire
LN4 4NR.

We have  a prize of a year’s membership to be won. If the  winner has already joined for this year, they will receive membership for next year.

To enter, follow the instructions in the Rafflecopter widget below. Please note that clicking on "I did it" without actually doing the task - commenting, following or tweeting as asked  - or doing the task without clicking on  "I did it" - won't get you into the draw.

The competition closes  on 29 February, but as I'm using Rafflecopter which uses American time zones,  it, erm...... won't be at midnight. I can't get my brain around time zones,so please be guided by the ticker that tells you how much time you have left to enter.

Hand made Thursday - The Crafty Comper

Last year was my year for winning craft goodies. In fact  I hardly had to buy any all year. My wins included:

• a pack of Christmas Dufex designs
• a bumper pack of Christmas embellishments
• a sheet of unmounted stamps
• a set of flower and leaf punches
• a tag punch with a set of matching stamps and an inkpad
• a huge jar of assorted buttons
• a scrapbooking kit
• almost 1,000 (yes, a thousand) sheets of 12 x 12 paper and card, in four separate competitions

I don't think I'll  need to buy another sheet of paper! Note that I used the word  "need"..... "want" is another matter completely!

Here are  a few cards I made with some of the loot:

I've already started my crafty wins for 2012, as last week  a CD of really cute designs arrived - very useful with a 2½year old in the family and another grandchild due soon. I've already managed to make a couple of cards from it

If you'd like to be a crafty winner too, keep your eye open for competitions on craft suppliers' websites and Facebook pages, as  well as blogs and of course the monthly craft magazines. My comping and crafting friend Winn Sommor, whose latest puzzle booklet you can win here , tells me she has won lots of lovely craft prizes from writing to the letters pages of her favourite craft magazines too.

Now I need to win a bigger house to store all my crafting stash in!

I'm joining in with Handmade Thursday on White Lily Green's blog with this post.

A new way to draw a winner on Twitter - and the winner of my birthday competition

Running - and entering - retweet to win competitions on Twitter can be a very hit and miss affair. There doesn't seem to be any 100% reliable way of collecting entries and knowing exactly who has entered, and if you have entered a competition you can never be 100% sure your entry has been received.

People are sometimes left questioning promoters who announce winners - was the draw done fairly? Or did they just choose the last person to enter/the person with the prettiest avatar/their sister? Even a promoter who is determined to do everything by the book can be puzzled by the unpredictability of  Twitter's various functions.

Take for instance the "Seventh Birthday" competition I ran on Twitter a  few days ago. I bookmarked the competition tweet - Twitter tells me that it has been retweeted 95 times. So I should have received 95 entries. I could only see who the last 15 entrants were, and I couldn't find any way to access a list of the other 80.

I  set my account to send an email every time the tweet was retweeted. I only got 33 emails.

I checked my Activity and @mentions regularly to look for entries. I found about 40 entries.

I also included a hashtag and ran  a hashtag search. It gave me just 17 results, including some (but not all) of my own tweets.

However, a new system has been set up that will get round all those problems. It can pick up on every instance of a retweet of any given tweet, and what's more will perform a random draw so there is no danger of an entrant being favoured or losing out because  their name or avatar.  The system is called Twitterdraw and has been set up by Iain Haywood of Competition Hunter

It can draw a random follower from all your followers, a random retweeter of your chosen tweet or a random tweeter of a given hashtag.  And it takes a matter of seconds.

I used Twitterdraw to choose the winner of my competition, and it pulled Vicky Robinson, @xVickyRx  out of the cyberhat. It showed me a link to her profile and I could see that she had indeed retweeted, even though she hadn't showed up in my mentions, hashtag search or emails. So without Twitterdraw, even though she had entered correctly, she wouldn't have been in the draw.

I was delighted with Twitterdraw and would have no hesitation in recommending it to anyone wanting a simple and fair way to choose a random winner on Twitter.

Compers, if ever you feel a Twitter competition has been drawn unfairly, why not suggest Twitterdraw to the promoter?

QUICK! Enter by the 14th for a lovely weekend break.

I've just been shopping and spotted "WIN!" stickers on packs of fresh duck in Waitrose - and incidentally grabbed myself a bargain for our Valentine's dinner as they were half price. I'll be slow roasting it and serving it with apple sauce and sage and onion stuffing and a bottle of rosé wine..... but I digress....

There's very little info on the outside of the sticker, but inside it tells you to go to www.gressinghamfoods.co.uk/love for a chance to win a luxury weekend break or one of three duck hampers.

The first prize is a two night break in Suffolk, at  either The Salthouse Harbour Hotel in Ipswich or The Angel Hotel in Bury St Edmunds. Both look lovely! Dinner on one night is included, and the winner and three runners up will also get a hamper of  duck products.

But hurry! The competition closes on February 14th.

"Birthday" cake!

This was sent to me by @MrsBun2002  Virtual Cake Decorator eCard

Thank you very much - calorie free and sugar free too! It's made my day.

Happy Seventh Birthday to Grape Vine

Today it is exactly seven years since I took over Grape Vine from John Lock, who had been producing it for twelve years and felt it was time to retire. Since then I have helped hundreds of readers to win thousands of prizes, and every single one reported to me feels as good as winning it myself.

Also today, I tweeted my 50,000th tweet, and on Wednesday it will be three years since I joined Twitter.

Taking those experieces together, what a lot I've  learned in a relatively short time! And hopefully I've passed  on a lot of the things I have learned to some of you.

To celebrate, I am running a quickie competition on Twitter. The prize is a bundle of goodies comprising

a signed Rosemary Schrager's Breakfasts recipe book
a smelly Dalek for your dashboard (go on, you KNOW you want one)
a "Versatile Vegetables" address and birthday book
and most importantly, a 3 month subscription to Grape Vine, or of course an extension to your sub if you are already a subscriber.

All you have to do to enter is retweet the competition tweet which you will find here

The competition closes at 8pm on Monday  13th February and is open to UK residents only

The Galloping Gourmet

I originally wrote this back in 2007 after a wonderful prize experience from the Evening Standard. How I miss their Gourmet Challenge competition which vanished when the paper became a free one a while ago. This was the second occasion I had been involved in the final - the previous time had a different format, and was also at one of Giorgio Locatelli's restaurants, but all the finalists had to guess the ingredients in a series of dishes and the person with the most correct (not me) won a holiday to Italy. On the second occasion, the evening out was itself the prize, and one of those wonderful "money can't buy" experiences that our amazing hobby sometimes throws our way.

-o0o-
 

I am a great fan of the annual Evening Standard Gourmet Challenge quiz – being both a foodie and a comper it combines two of my favourite hobbies – and this year’s quiz was a tough challenge (I have learned that the setters had gone to great lengths to make the answers ungoogleable) so I was delighted to get a LWE telling me that I was one of this year’s 10 winners, who would be taking part in a “Gourmet Gallop”.

The prize was dinner in four of London’s top restaurants – all on the same evening!  The ten winners (partners and guests were not allowed, which meant we all mingled much better than we would have done as couples) met up with our hosts from the Standard at Sketch, alleged to be the most expensive restaurant in Britain. More like a living gallery of modern art than a restaurant, we enjoyed a guided tour of the surreal labyrinth of rooms and staircases – even the loos were works of art – while slurping Pommery champagne and sampling canapés as surreal as the surroundings. A strawberry and black pepper vodka martini is unusual enough – even if it doesn’t have a langoustine floating in it!

When the champagne bottles had been drunk dry, we piled into cars waiting to take us to Scotts, a very traditional British seafood restaurant. Here we had a choice of baked spider crab (my choice – and utterly delicious) or a dozen oysters, three each of four species. The oyster lovers in the party thought they were in heaven!

Back in the cars again, this time to The Greenhouse – a very stylish restaurant tucked away in a quiet Mayfair mews. Here we were treated to a choice of sea bass  or veal – I opted for the veal and enjoyed an exquisitely tender piece of delicious meat served with asparagus and girolles.

Already feeling full, we were driven on to Locanda Locatelli for dessert. Giorgio Locatelli was waiting to greet us, and it felt just as if he was welcoming us into his home. Dessert was served at a long, family style table and I’m sure we were authentically noisy as the wine that had been so generously poured with each course began to take effect.

The first part of our dessert was a rice spoon filled with tiramisu. Next came a small dish full of fresh berries topped with a Catalan Cream, then a plate with a tiny, elegant chocolate doughnut and an equally tiny scoop of coffee ice cream. Then coffee and dessert wines were served and we sat back, replete – or so we thought! Moments later, Giorgio appeared with a huge platter of Sicilian pastries,  and before we had finished helping ourselves, he was back with a whole cassata. But the best was yet to come – two enormous platters heaped high with scoops of ice cream of every flavour imaginable. Simple, stunningly presented and of course the most Italian dessert imaginable. Somehow we all found room for at least one helping.

The whole evening had been well planned, smoothly executed and a joy to participate in. At each restaurant we were warmly welcomed and made to feel extra special, and the food and drink were both generous and delicious.

And as we left Locanda Locatelli there was one more surprise for us – each of the restaurants had made up a goodie bag for every winner, as had the Evening Standard, so we had five smart carrier bags to take away, containing goodies such as signed recipe books, sweets, biscuits, cheeses, olive oil and, rather bizarrely, an eye mask. I fear that may have been intended to put over one’s eyes when standing on the scales next morning!