Competition Grape Vine

Win a year in the Winnin Post club 2012-13

2012-03-01T05:48:00.000Z

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.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

The Galloping Gourmet

2012-02-10T06:45:00.000Z

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!

The Strada Loving Challenge

2012-02-08T16:34:00.000Z

Strada are celebrating Valentine's day by giving you a chance to win a 3 night break at the 4* Hotel Savoia & Jolanda in Venice for 2 - courtesy of Citalia

To enter, go to the app on their Facebook page and complete the weekly challenges - everyone who completes at least two of the challenges and scores at least 10 points by the closing date of 26 Feb will go into the draw.

There are several tasks each week and you can choose which to do. Each has a points rating beside it and you need to make sure the ones you choose add up to at least 5 points. You may choose to upload a photo, answer a question or tweet a message.

It's lovely to see a competition that involves something more interesting than simply giving your name and email address, isn't it?

Top tips for savvy compers

2012-02-07T13:17:00.000Z

This weekend it will be seven years since I took over Grape Vine from John Lock, when he retired. Grape Vine's motto is "news, views, tips and clues" so I decided to celebrate the anniversary with a bumper collection of tips.

Over the last few weeks, I have been tweeting a daily tip, with the hashtag #compingtip : you can find them all by searching Twitter for that hashtag, but to make life easier I have brought them all together for you here. While many of them relate specifically to Twitter, most can be applied to all of your comping, however you prefer to do it.

Good luck - and here's to the next seven years!

#compingtip

Always check the rules and instructions. Don't rely on another comper as they may have been in a rush and not checked themselves

Don’t tweet the same thing several times – you could go to Twitter jail or be filtered out of search

Make sure the person running the comp gets an @ mention in your tweet or they won’t know you’ve entered

Check your @ messages and DMs at least once a day to see if there are any winning messages

Follow the person running the comp – it’s good manners and means they can DM you if you win

Check the closing date – it’s no use entering a comp that has already closed

If there’s a link to the rules, follow it. Otherwise look at the promoter’s timeline for info about the comp

Follow as many other compers as you can – if they spot a new comp you’ll be one of the first to know

Don’t let your timeline be all retweets as you may get filtered out of search. Chat a bit as well!

Don’t copy another comper’s entry if there’s a slogan or opinion question – you need to give your own answer.

Check that the promoter is in the UK or says the comp is open to the UK or you won’t get your prize

It’s fine to use the retweet button nowadays, in fact if the promoter collects entries by email it’s the ONLY way to enter.

If there’s a hashtag, make sure you include it and spell it correctly

When a tweet says “enter by 4pm”, it’s no use entering at 8pm!

Say thank you when you get a prize. It’s good manners and lets the person know it’s arrived safely.

Don’t retweet other compers’ entries. It’s annoying to them and means the promoter probably won’t see your entry.

Have a picture on your profile, not just a Twitter egg. It really does make a difference to how much you’ll win.

Make lists – one for your comping friends, and lists for comps that run regularly on certain days

Look out for scams and hackers – you CAN’T see “who viewed your profile”.

If a promoter tweets about a comp, then doesn’t tweet again for 6 months, the comp isn’t going to happen.

Don’t cheat! Promoters can easily spot people tweeting from multiple accounts.

Tell non-comping friends and family to select “Hide retweets from this person” on your Twitter page.

If a winner is being picked at a certain number of followers, check their current number to make sure you’re not too late.

Not every comp on Twitter is a retweet comp – make sure you’re doing the right thing.

Interact with the promoters – most of them have a real person handling the Twitter account and they’ll enjoy a chat.

Try to make some free time on Fridays as there are so many one day only comps then – it can be hard to keep up!

Hashtag searches can sometimes help you to find comps. Try #competition #giveaway #bookgiveaway and #comp

It sometimes helps to enter right at the end of a comp, as older tweets can be lost from Twitter search.

Don’t have a protected Twitter account – nobody will ever know you’ve entered their comps.

If a promoter is based in Ireland, check which part. The Republic has different laws so you probably can’t enter their comps.

Treat over-generous comps with caution. Somebody with 250 followers can’t afford to give as big a prize as one with 25,000.

Don’t tweet more than 100 times an hour or you’ll end up in Twitter jail.

An obvious “comping” email address can count against you. Avoid the words “comp” and “win” in it.

Don’t claim you’ve done something (liked, followed, commented, subscribed) if you’ve not – you’ll be disqualified.

The Chorley Comping Day is coming

2012-02-06T15:07:00.002Z

Formidable Friends are holding a Comping Day on Saturday 24th March 2012 at St Joseph's Parish Hall, Chorley.

Tickets are £25 and include a buffet and unlimited teas/coffees and soft drinks.

If you would like to attend, please send a cheque made out to Formidable Friends for the sum of £25 and send it together with a Large 2nd class Stamp, self addressed C5 envelope to

Mrs Anne Marie Martin,
14 Rawlyn Road
Bolton
BL1 5RQ.

Please include your name and contact details and the details of any one else you are applying for. All info will be sent out about 3 weeks before the event

Protected Twitter accounts are no use for compers!

2012-02-03T15:27:00.000Z

Last week a fellow comper, let's call him @fred, told me that he'd entered literally thousands of competitions on Twitter and never had a single win. I offered to have a look at his Twitter feed to see if I could see any obvious mistakes.

So off I went to his Twitter page and all I could see was:

@fred's Tweets are protected.
Only confirmed followers have access to @fred's Tweets and complete profile. You need to send a request before you can start following this account.

I couldn't see any of his tweets - and neither could any of the promoters whose competitions he had been entering. So he had entered those thousands of competitions and hadn't stood a chance of winning anything.

When I told him that, he unprotected his tweets and I could then see that he had tweeted me several messages - questions, comments and even messages of congratulations when I won things, and I had never seen any of them.

This is because if your tweets are protected, ONLY people you have authorised to can see any of them at all. You can be following other people, you can retweet their tweets, you can send them messages and they will never be aware that you have done it!

Twitter doesn't really make this clear, so you might think that having a protected account stops stalkers and potential spammers from seeing your tweets while still letting you talk to people you follow even if they don't follow you, but unfortunately it doesn't work that way. So if you are a comper and have your tweets protected, you will never win anything.

To check whether you have protected tweets, go to your Twitter page and click on the arrowhead next to your name on the top right, then select Settings. On the Account tab, scroll down to Tweet Privacy and make sure the box next to "Protect my tweets" is unchecked. If it is checked, click the box to clear it then click on Save at the bottom.

That's what @fred did - and just five days later he had his first Twitter win.

There is a handy guide to who can see what when you send a tweet which you can see at Meg Pickard 's Flickr page.

Two lovely Valentines' Day competitions for you

2012-02-02T10:55:00.001Z

There are some lovely Valentines Day competitions around this year - here are two with brilliant prizes from some favourite restaurants.

Bella Italia is running a competition to win a Pamper Spa Day for 2 courtesy of Red Letter Days
Participants will be able to select a 'love card' design from a gallery and write their 'love message' there to post it on the wall of their chosen dearest.
All love notes sent will be then added to their gallery and entered into the competition to win a Pamper Spa Day for 2 people courtesy of Red Letter Days.
Enter on their Facebook page

Café Rouge Their competition is to win a romantic break at a luxury Chateau in France
To enter, you need to eat at Café Rouge and enter the details from your till receipt on their Facebook page then answer the question - you can find the answer by following the link they provide to the Chateau's website.

Both competitions close on February 29th, so you have plenty time to pop into Café Rouge for your romantic dinner.

How will I know if I win a competition on Twitter?

2012-01-31T11:45:00.000Z

If you are new to comping on Twitter, especially if you have already experienced the confusion of Facebook, you may be worried about how you will find out whether you have won a competition on Twitter.

One or two people have told me that they try to read every single tweet they have missed while they are away from Twitter, in case they've missed an announcement that they have won.

The good news is that this isn't necessary. When a promoter chooses their winner, they will contact them either by mentioning them in a tweet or sending them a direct message. It's always a good idea to follow somebody who is running a competition, even if they don't actually say that you have to, because they can't send you a direct message if you aren't following them.

So how do you know you have won?

Well, to check to see if you have been mentioned in a tweet, go to your twitter page and look at the top of your column of tweets, to the second tab along, where it will show your user name. For instance my tab is labelled @janesgrapevine. If you click on that, you will see a list of all the tweets sent to you or mentioning your name. If you can see all sorts of other stuff jumbled in among them, click the "show mentions only" box on the top right and you will only see tweets with your name in - then you can scan down the list for anything saying you are a winner.

To see if you have been sent a Direct Message, click on "Messages" right at the very top of the screen.

It's a good idea to check both of these every time you visit Twitter, but if you are still worried you might miss something, you can set Twitter to send you an email every time somebody mentions you or sends you a Direct Message. To do this, click on the little arrowhead to the very right of your name at the top of your Twitter page and choose Settings. Then choose "Notifications" and tick the boxes next to "Email me when I'm sent a direct message" and "I'm sent a reply or mentioned". Finally click on "Save" and you can relax, knowing that you'll never miss a winning notification.

What happens when I win?

When you win, the promoter will need to know where to send your prize. It isn't a good idea, from a personal security point of view, for you to send them your address in a tweet, so they will either give you an email address to send your details to, or tweet you a link to a form to fill in on a website, or ask you to send your details in a Direct Message.

They don't always realise that they need to be following you in order for you to Direct Message them, but a polite tweet to them asking them to follow you so that you can send it almost always does the trick. If they are being a bit dozy and not checking their incoming tweets, click on their user name to take you to their own Twitter page where there should be a link to their website. Use the "Contact Us" page on the site to send them a message, remembering to include your Twitter name so they can confirm that it is you.

And just to brighten this up, here is a photo of a beautiful bunch of orchids I won yesterday.

Twice the prize!

2012-01-29T16:05:00.000Z

A few weeks ago, I spotted a tiebreaker competition on the Facebook page of Jack's Male Grooming. There was a lovely prize - £250 worth of men's grooming products for the person you nominated. And I thought of a really good slogan (although sadly I've forgotten what it was now - Christmas rather got in the way of things!). The trouble is, my husband really isn't keen on scrubs, gels, potions and moisturisers, but I knew my friend Kevin would appreciate the prize, so I nominated him.

I was really excited to hear that I had won - as many of you will agree, winning a treat for yourself is wonderful but winning a treat for someone else is even better! They wanted to do a prize presentation, with some of the girls from Jack's shop, so we agreed to meet in Kevin's central London office on Friday afternoon.

The girls duly arrived, not with one box of male grooming products but with TWO! To my complete surprise, there was a complete set of products for me too. Each box included a selection of hair, body and skin care prodicts and £70 of vouchers to spend in the salon.

What a lovely prize - and twice the prize I'd thought it was going to be!

Three Little Words

2012-01-25T15:03:00.000Z

A couple of days ago, some of you may have seen tweets from me asking you to tweet the three words that sprang to mind when you saw a tweet from me. I was very relieved that not one of you said "Not her again!"

These are the replies I got

Very useful information!
My friend Jane.
new comp great!
Specsavers subscription justified!
Has she won?
Comps, cards, advice
helpful, informative and wise
yay witty comps
Helpful, friendly, fun!
Yippeeee comp ta
information competition advice
sideways, forward, honest
informative comping information
comping/humour/craft
competitions, freebies, happy :)

Thanks very much to everyone who joined in - and now my head has subsided to its normal size after being swollen by all those lovely comments, I'll explain what it is all about.

I am currently taking part in the 30 Day Twitter Challenge by Nikki Pilkington and that day's task was to use the three word question to find out whether what your followers associate with your tweets is actually what you are trying to put across. I'm glad to say I seem to be giving you all the right idea about me!

"Somebody's retweeted my competition entry!"

2012-01-24T17:04:00.000Z

Lots of compers get upset if somebody retweets their competition entry, fearing that it means they will be disqualified, so I'm going to take a look at what happens when you retweet something.

Let's say there are two compers, Alice and Barbara, who are both entering a competition run by Company. (See what I did there - I can call them A, B and C now!)

C Tweets "RT to win this smashing prize"

A sees the tweet and retweets it.

B sees A's retweet but instead of going to C's timeline and retweeting the original tweet, they retweet A's retweet.

Who sees what?

Well, if A used the RT button, her entry will show up in her timeline with C's avatar and two arrows underneath, along with a note "retweeted by A". If B also hits the retweet button, it will also show up in her own timeline, also with C's avatar, and with the note "retweeted by B". When C looks at their tweet to see who has retweeted it, both will show up. Both have entered the competition, A will probably never know that B has retweeted the tweet and all is well.

If A used the retweet button but B would rather enter by copying and pasting, she can copy the text of C's tweet into a new tweet. Once again A won't be affected. However B must be very careful of something - she MUST remember that as well as the text of the tweet, she needs to start the tweet with RT @C and then paste in the text - otherwise not only will C not see her entry, but new compers on Twitter who see B's tweet might think that B is running the competition and try to enter by retweeting it themselves!

If A has used the "old style" copy-and-paste way of retweeting, and B also copies and pastes her tweet, remembering to include the full text of the tweet including the part that says RT @C, then again all is well and A is unaffected.

Where it gets messy is when A has done a copy-and-paste tweet but B uses the retweet button. It will then show up in A's timeline as a tweet of hers that has been retweeted, and in B's timeline as a retweet of A's tweet.

In C's activity column it will show up as "RT @A RT @C RT to win this smashing prize" if it shows up at all so if C sees it at all, they won't see that B has entered, only that A has done so. That's because B, by using the retweet button, has told Twitter that it is A's message she is retweeting and not C's.

The message C sees won't be an exact retweet of their original tweet, so they may not count it as an entry to their competition, but if they do they will count it as a second entry for A and poor old B won't have entered at all. B's "entry" will have gone to A instead.

Picture it this way, if you are a comper who likes to do postcard entries from magazines. If A passed on her copy of C's magazine to you and you wanted to enter a competition in it, you wouldn't post your postcard to A would you? Well, retweeting A's tweet is the same as doing that!

So going back to the problem "Will we both be disqualified?" the answer is "probably not".

Most competitions on Twitter don't limit you to one entry per person. Those that do limit you will almost always allow your first entry even if somebody retweets it. However if somebody has retweeted your entry and you don't like the fact that they have done so, go back to your own message, the one they retweeted, and delete it. Their retweet will disappear too. Then all you need to do is tweet it again!

The moral of all this is that in certain cases it is OK to retweet another comper's entry, but to be absolutely certain that you are entered you need to go to the promoter's timeline and tweet from there.

Happy (re) tweeting!

Follow the instructions - or you won't win!

2012-01-23T17:00:00.002Z

Follow the instructions - or you won't win! It sounds obvious doesn't it? When you enter a competition, you need to follow the instructions so that you are entered into the draw, or your entry goes in front of the judges. But are you sure you always do what is asked of you?

Take my own monthly competition, for instance. Every month, around 1 in 4 entries are disqualified because the entrants didn't read the instructions. They put the wrong answer in the answer box, or sometimes no answer at all, or they enter 10 times within the space of a few minutes (incidentally, if you enter twice at different times, I presume you've simply forgotten that you've already done that month's entry, so your entry still counts)

Promoters and bloggers I talk to come back over and over again with figures of 1 in 4 or 1 in 5 disqualifications, for lots of different reasons. Here are some I have heard of recently:

Trying to enter after the competition has closed.

In a postal comp, forgetting to put your name and address on the entry form or postcard.

Not having the correct proof of purchase for a postal comp or one that needs a text or online entry with a code.

Entering with several different email addresses within the space of a few minutes. Most websites CAN tell that you are the same person, even if you think they can't!

Filling in the Rafflecopter form that is used on many blog competitions now by simply clicking "I did this" for every option, when you haven't performed the task or given the details of your like/follow/sign up/tweet in the space provided. If you are deliberately doing this to save time, thinking you will get away with it, I've got bad news for you - you've already wasted a LOT of time! Because Rafflecopter collects all the information you give so that the blogger checking the results can see at a glance whether you have done what you were supposed to.

Ignoring the Rafflecopter form, where there is one, and just making your entries as blog comments. A blogger using Rafflecopter will have a list of entries compiled by the service, and if you don't use the form, you won't be on the list.

Commenting on a blog to say "I have followed you with Twitter/Google Friend Connect/Email" when you haven't done. Every blogger will double check when they draw a winner and if you haven't done what you say you have, you simply won't win.

Commenting on a blog or Facebook page - but saying the wrong thing. You might be asked to tell them something like your favourite song, describe a book, a place or a recipe, or answer a question. If, instead, you write something along the lines of "Lovely prize, please enter me" then you just don't stands a chance.

Trying to enter by making a comment when there is a form to fill in. This happens quite often on Facebook pages where the competition is being run through an app, and websites with entry forms where there is also a comments facility. The winner will be chosen from entries submitted on the form and the promoter probably won't even see the comments made by would-be entrants.

I'm sure some bloggers and Facebook page owners who read this will think of other ways entrants fail to get into the hat, so please comment or contact me if you would like to suggest anything to add to the list.

And compers, every time you enter a competition, remember that you don't want to be one of the "1 in 4". Take a little time to read the instructions properly and do exactly as you are asked, and then relax knowing that up to a quarter of those you are competing against won't bother to do the same!

For more tips on how to be a careful comper and make sure every entry counts, see the Loquax blog where there's even a handy poster to remind you how to enter Facebook competitions.

When is a competition not a competition?

2012-01-21T14:57:00.000Z

This morning I was intrigued to log in to Twitter and see that the top trending topic was #WinFootyTickets even though I'd not heard of any such competition on Twitter. I know I sometimes miss things, but surely I would have heard about one that had so many entries it was the most popular topic in the world? (Well....the world according to Twitter anyway!)

So I clicked on the hashtag to take a closer look. What I saw was thousands and thousands of people all saying who they would like to win tickets to see, or why they would like to see them. None of them had included a promoter of any kind in their tweet, just their message and the hashtag #WinFootyTickets. Some had started to argue amongst themselves about which teams you could win tickets for, or whether the word "footy" in the hashtag was correct or should be replaced with "football" but not one of them seemed to know or care who was running the competition, what the prizes actually were, when the competition closed or any of the info we compers would want before entering.

Eventually my search took me to the Barclays Football Twitter feed, where they have a tweet advertising the competition that is running at their cashpoints and on their website, with Premiership tickets to be won every 90 minutes. If you are a Grape Vine reader, you will see it listed in the Long Running Comps section every month, and I'm sure most compers already know about it. If it is news to you, you can enter here and it is free to enter.

So why is it trending on Twitter and why do so many people think they have entered? Well, the Barclays Football tweet is a promoted one, which means that they have paid Twitter to pin it to the top of lots of relevant Twitter searches, so that if somebody goes to look for tweets about, say, football, it will be at the top of the list, and it will stay at the top. The tweet itself reads:

BarclaysFootyBarclays Football

77 Retweets

Try and win Barclays Premier League tickets, click http://drhb.me/q6K #WinFootyTickets #BPL please RT

20 JanFavoriteRetweetReply

Promoted by Barclays Football

As a comper, you can probably see right away that you need to click on the link to reach the competition, but today lots of non-compers must have seen that tweet and not realised it, thinking they could enter on Twitter. Once they started tweeting about it, the hashtag will have started to appear more and more often until it hit the Trending Topic list, so now people are logging in to Twitter, seeing the hashtag appear in their Trending Topics list and tweeting about it straight away. They don't really know what competition they think they are entering, and the result is that they aren't entering any competition at all - a comp that is not a comp! The moral of the story is "Look before you Tweet">

Never mind, it's keeping them all busy while we compers head over to the Barclays website and enter for real! Good luck everybody!

Hand made Thursday - more cards

2012-01-19T12:16:00.000Z

This year I made two New Year's Resolutions

1. To declutter the house
2. to make at least two cards a week instead of spending my crafting time shopping for new stash

If I can clear the mountains of stash, I'll have achieved both resolutions!

My first move was to go through my huge pile of craft mags. I set aside the ones I return to for inspiration over and over again as I know I will never part with them. Then I made another, smallish, pile of those that have just one project in them that I want to either recreate or base an idea of my own on. The remaining mags were parcelled up and posted to a lady I have just "met" online who makes cards to sell to raise funds for charity.

I recently bought a set of music themed stamps, featuring Beethoven (if anyone ever sees a stamp with Mozart on it, please let me know!) so one of my first makes of the year used this set and was based on a design in Making Cards magazine.

Then I moved on to a set of Stampin' Up stamps I bought from Amy at CraftyThINKer and tackled my own interpretation of a card featured on her blog but originally created by Jade at Jaded Crafter

Thank you for the inspiration, ladies!
The crafting and decluttering goes on - I've neglected my stamps for too long and i'm loveing getting back into stamping again. And if I make more cards than I can use, I know that hand made cards for RAF personnel serving overseas to send to family back home are always welcome at OBWS

I am joining in Hadmade Thursday on White Lily Green

If it wasn't for comping......

2012-01-17T16:27:00.000Z

If it wasn't for comping I wouldn't be blogging!

If it wasn't for comping, I wouldn't be producing my own comping magazine.

If it wasn't for comping, I wouldn't have learned all the computer, internet and Twitter tips that I share.

If it wasn't for comping, I wouldn't have

had a trip round the world
visited the Great Barrier Reef
taken tea on a balcony overlooking the Himalayas
stood on the rim of the Grand Canyon
stroked the nose of a real live whale, in the wild
drunk champagne that costs £150 a bottle
cooked with chef Atul Kochar, in his Michelin starred kitchen
appeared on The Good Food Show Christmas Quiz on TV
avoided the traffic jams at the British Grand Prix by arriving and leaving in a helicopter
spent a New Year weekend in a country house filled with friends
had trackside seats when a World sprinting record was broken
been able to shower family members with goodies and even holidays, that I could never have given them otherwise

But more importantly, if it wasn't for comping, I wouldn't have gotto know all the wonderful friends I have made through the hobby, some of them now real "in-the-flesh" friends and some of them still virtual ones.

What would YOU not have done if it wasn't for comping?

WIN “ONE OF THE BEST HAIRDRYERS IN THE WORLD” FROM MONEYMAGPIE!

2012-01-10T16:10:00.000Z

Consumer finance experts Moneymagpie.com, in association with daily deals site Dealtastic, are giving away five fabulous NutriHeat hairdryers to help you beat the January gloom!

Recommended by Trevor Sorbie, NutriHeat features three heat settings, two speed settings and a classy real leather handle. In addition, its curl creator will give you glossy, moisturised and well-defined waves. NutriHeat’s mighty 1800w power output makes it one of the speediest hairdryers available, so it’s the perfect accessory for those with busy lives who care about their hair.

To be in with a chance of winning this indispensable accessory, worth £59.99, simply visit Moneymagpie’s Facebook page and tell them your top budget beauty tip. The best five chosen will win this great prize.

Oh, Fat Duck!

2012-01-09T14:40:00.000Z

Some time ago I won dinner for two at Heston Blumenthal’s Michelin starred restaurant, The Fat Duck in Bray. I decided to save the meal up as a birthday treat for my husband Mark, so we went there on the weekend of his birthday in March. The prize consisted of the famous tasting menu, with specially selected wines to match each course.

When the taxi stopped outside a row of terraced cottages, we had to ask the driver where the restaurant was – it turned out to be one of the cottages, opening directly on to the street with hardly anything other than a small brass plaque to show that it wasn’t just a private home.

Inside, the restaurant was small too – probably only seating 50 people at the most, but with a very calm and stylish atmosphere. There was no bar or seating area – we were taken straight to our table and offered champagne from the “champagne trolley” but we decided instead to start with the sherry that was to accompany the first stage of the meal, a lovely crisp Manzanilla that went beautifully with the olives that were waiting for us on the table.

The tasting menu started with a palate cleanser of Nitro green tea and lime mousse. A trolley came to the table with a steaming bowl of liquid nitrogen on it, and an egg white and green tea mixture was squirted into it from a contraption a bit like a squirty cream dispenser. The little ball of iced meringue that formed was dusted with lime zest and had to be eaten in one mouthful, while lime oil was sprayed into the air in front of us. It was like eating a mouthful of cold, fresh mountain air!

Next came a plate with two tiny squares of jelly, one red and one orange. The waiter told us one was beetroot and the other orange, and we should eat the orange one first. So of course we duly started with the orange coloured one, and were surprised to find it tasted of beetroot. It had been made from golden beetroot and the second deliciously tangy jelly from blood oranges – the first of many confusing experiences for our taste buds.

The next course was a single rock oyster, with a little passionfruit jelly in the shell, stylishly presented on a black wooden block with a sprig of lavender. I’m trying hard to learn to love oysters, but I still think they feel like snot, and I’m afraid the passion fruit jelly just emphasised that texture for me. My husband doesn’t eat any fish or shellfish, so his dish was a mixture of Puy lentils and mint on a peach jelly – I think I would have preferred that!

Then we moved on to ice cream – mustard ice cream! It was served with a sauce of red cabbage gazpacho. The quantities were tiny – about a heaped teaspoonful of ice cream and a tablespoonful of gazpacho, but the flavours so intense it was if they had taken a normal full sized portion and condensed it into a thimbleful.

Another odd experience followed – a rectangular basket of moss was brought to the table with two little plastic boxes nestling on top. We were given a box each and instructed to take out of the box a thin film and allow it to dissolve on our tongues. It was oak-moss flavoured, and while it was dissolving, something (more liquid nitrogen, I think) was poured over the basket of moss so that moss scented smoke spilled over the table and wafted around us. Immediately, we were given a tiny finger of toast to eat, topped with an oak moss and truffle mixture and slices of the tiniest radish I have ever seen. On the same plate was our next dish, an interesting swivelling cup filled with layers (starting from the bottom) of pea purée, quail jelly, langoustine cream (beetroot cream for Mark) and a tiny scoop of parfait of foie gras. I found every one of the layers delicious but I have to say I didn’t think they went well together, apart from the pea purée which worked with all the other layers.

Phew! With all the pre-dinner nibbles out of the way, and our half-bottle of sherry finished, it was time to start the meal, so the bread basket arrived with some of the creamiest, most delicious butter I have ever tasted – I wonder whether they have found a way to concentrate the flavour of that too?

Our first “real” course was the famous snail porridge. We had been expecting something grey and slimy, rather like Chinese congee, so were pleasantly surprised to find the oats had been made into something the texture of risotto, bright green with parsley, with the snails – not at all tough or chewy – nestling on top and a topping of very finely shredded, intensely flavoured dried ham and delicate shavings of fennel. It was served with a French red vin de pays – the wine waiter was excellent, very knowledgeable yet able to talk about the wines in real English rather than “winespeak”.

Next came roast foie gras. It was served with tiny dice of an almond jelly, a bitter cherry sauce and a chamomile flavoured froth with a bitter cherry in it, and accompanied by a New Zealand Gewurztraminer. The foie gras had been poached very slowly – one of Blumenthal’s signature cooking techniques – which left it very light and tender, and the bitterness of the cherries and slight sweetness of the wine made this an amazing combination and one of the high spots of the meal, despite our objections to the production methods of foie gras (I think I’m going to have to do the foodie equivalent of carbon offsetting now) and the fact that Mark had never enjoyed it when he had tried it before.

Then there was a sardine on toast sorbet for me, served with a slice of dried mackerel and a salad of shredded seaweed. My husband was given a velouté soup with black truffles. Sake was served with this course. I’m afraid I really didn’t like the sorbet and mackerel at all – the smell and taste were too strong, reminding me of the dried fish shops that I used to avoid in Chinese markets when I lived in the far East. But the waiter cleared my unfinished dish away with a cheerful “Thank you for trying it.”

Salmon, again slow cooked, wrapped in a liquorice jelly, was my next course. There were two pieces of roast artichoke on the plate, and the rest of it was spectacularly decorated with tiny dots of olive oil and tiny individual cells of pink grapefruit. It was a work of art both on the plate and in the mouth. Mark’s non-fish dish was slow roasted belly pork on a bed of Savoy cabbage with truffled macaroni. A Portuguese red wine, very smooth and deeply flavoured, was served with this – I think it went better with the pork than the salmon.

The main course came next – a lamb cutlet, again slowly cooked, so it was meltingly tender. The waiter said it was sealed in a plastic bag, then poached in a warm water bath – just a boil-in-a-bag meal then! The onion and thyme purée and roast shallot perfectly complemented the meltingly tender meat, as did the Valpolicella served with it.

Before moving on to the desserts, we were served a cup of tea to refresh our palates. But it was no ordinary cup of tea – at one side of the cup, the tea was scalding hot and at the other it was ice cold. It created the most peculiar sensation in the mouth – and stranger still, the hot and cold sides stayed hot and cold for the whole time it took to drink the tea, rather than mixing together as they ought to have done.

At this stage we were offered cheese as an optional extra. We had drooled over the sight and smell of the cheese trolley visiting other tables, with a vast selection of cheeses all offered at the peak of perfection, but despite the tiny portions we were already beginning to feel pretty full so decided to stick with the set menu.

Tiny, tiny individual ice cream cornets were brought to us next. Still in a bit of a mental whirl over the tea, I can’t remember what the first flavour of ice cream was, but there were two layers in the cornet and the second was a wonderfully intense fresh ginger ice cream. I could have happily devoured a whole bowl of it.

Then we were brought miniature sherbet fountains. Just like a small version of the yellow ones we all enjoyed as kids, except instead of a liquorice stick to eat it with, there was a hollowed out twig of Douglas Fir. This helped to prepare us for the pine-resin flavour of the mango and fir purée which accompanied the first dessert, a bavarios of lychee and mango. On the same plate there was a tiny scoop of blackcurrant sorbet, which once again seemed to have all the flavour of a much larger helping condensed into it. This explosion of flavour was perfectly complemented by the Austrian Riesling Eiswein that accompanied it.

Having had our sherbet fountains, another nostalgic sweetie appeared – a lollipop. But this one was a wafer thin sheet of a crunchy carrot and orange tuile. At the same time we were given what looked like a fruit pastille, but was another beetroot jelly, this time a sweet one.

To our surprise (if anything could surprise us by now) a waiter then said to us, “Good morning – it’s time for breakfast!” and placed cereal bowls in front of us containing what looked like individual packets of breakfast cereal, and a jug of milk between us. The contents of the packets certainly looked like tiny cornflakes – but they were actually little flakes of dried parsnip, and the ‘milk’ was also made from parsnip. A very unexpected – and utterly delicious – treat.

Then a waitress wheeled up a trolley with an old fashioned copper chafing dish on it. She said she was going to give us our cooked breakfast of bacon and eggs. First she placed plates in front of us with a hot, sticky piece of French Toast and a paper thin rasher of bacon on them (Mark’s plate had “Happy Birthday” painted around the rim in cocoa dust) , then she cracked an egg into the chafing dish to scramble it – but instead of lighting the burner under the dish, she poured a jugful of liquid nitrogen into the pan and scrambled the egg in the icy fumes. I don’t know how it happened, but it produced perfect light, fluffy scrambled egg – but ice cold! Served with our bacon and French toast, it was a perfect ending to a meal that had been a series of surprises from beginning to end, and went beautifully with the rich, sweet sticky Australian Rutherglen Muscat wine that came with it.

Finally as we sipped the last of our wine we were brought a plate of whisky wine gums, flavoured with a strong, smoky single malt, and 10p-sized tartlets filled with violet jelly, and some chocolate truffles, served inside a cocoa pod. By the time we got up to leave, we had spent almost four hours eating and drinking, and yet didn’t feel overstuffed or bloated, and didn’t have a trace of indigestion (although we were a bit wobbly on our feet after all that sherry and wine).

We saw the bill that The Times was footing - £465 for the two of us (this was five years ago - I expect it is even more now) . Was it worth it? It is a lot of money for a meal out, but this was so much more than a meal out – it was entertainment, theatre, education, involvement, an exploration of the effects of the senses on eating, and such a workout for the tastebuds we fully expected them to ache the next day.

One thing that particularly impressed me was the quality of the staff – with such an international reputation, they get customers from all over the world and we heard waiters chatting to customers in at least three languages. The staff were also very knowledgeable and could answer every question we asked about the dishes. One waiter explained to us that every few weeks each waiter is expected to leave his front-of-house duties and spend a week working with the chefs in the kitchen, so they know exactly how each dish is prepared.

I’d been a little worried that the other customers would all be members of the ‘glitterati’, dripping with diamonds and designer frocks, but in fact apart from one small party who looked like footballers and their WAGs (one of whom proposed to his girlfriend –and was accepted – during the course of the meal….. aaaah…..) they all seemed to be ordinary people who had gone along to try out the ultimate foodie experience – and they all seemed to be as delighted with it as we were.

A cookery holiday in Tuscany

2012-01-07T16:44:00.000Z

I've been digging around in my files, trying to inspire myself by reading about past prizes, and I came across this account I wrote ten years ago, after a trip to Tuscany that I won in a recipe competition run by Merchant Gourmet foods.

The kind of surprise I like - turning up to find that I am to spend a week living in a working winery with an unlimited supply of the product! That's how my prize trip to Tuscany started.

There were 7 of us on the cookery course - six Americans and me. We started with a guided tour of the vineyard and a look at the newly harvested grapes being turned into Chianti, then tasted a selection of the wines with nibbles made using the olive oil and honey also produced at the Palazzo. By the time we had had glasses of all seven wines (and grappa) we had become firm friends.

Dinner followed soon after - seven courses with more wine! We rolled back to our rooms at the end of the evening.

The following days followed a pattern - excursions during the day to local hilltop towns and food and wine producers, then a cookery class starting late in the afternoon, during which we made some of the many dishes we were served at dinner. The trips were fascinating; the cookery lessons lively and entertaining, and they removed a lot of the mystery from dishes I had previously thought very complicated. We were a lucky group in that we all had a great rapport which made everything (especially the wine) flow very freely. The chef and his translator made a great double act - they have recently recorded a programme for American television. I wish I could see it.

The weather was glorious, except for one day. The Tuscan countryside looked beautiful. The trips took us to all sorts of places, including a very memorable meal in an extremely expensive restaurant one day, and a peasant meal in an olive pressing factory the next - both so splendid it was impossible to say which was the better of the two.

The final day had no cooking class - we spent the day in Siena while the chef prepared a final feast for us. And what a feast! Another seven course blowout. For the first time, the dishes were from all over Italy instead of just from Tuscany. And in honour of the fact that two of our party were serious wine buffs, the owner of the Palazzo had raided his personal cellar for two bottles of the estate's own Chianti Reserva 1966. It was a treat and an honour to taste such an exclusive wine.

It would take too long to describe everything - the lovely Palazzo, its beautiful setting, the 17 cats, all the places we visited, the great characters among both the staff and the other guests, but I had a wonderful time, never for a moment felt uncomfortable about having gone alone and am just hoping to win the chance to go back next year!

A competition my crafty friends will love!

2012-01-05T16:29:00.002Z

As Grape Vine went in the post yesterday, today I felt justified in giving myself a day off working on it. As as you know, when I'm not working on GV, or entering competitions myself, I'm to be found cooking or crafting. Today I finally got all my craft things back out from where they had been stored over Christmas, and played with my new musical themed set of stamps. Here's the result:

Next I have some cute owl stamps to play with, which I'll be colouring in with my favourite pens - Promarkers. The range of colours is quite amazing, and because they blend so well the total number of colours you can get is quite literally infinite. I've got quite a few already, but as all crafters know, you can never have too many and I have a wishlist of colours tucked into my box of pens. I'm on the lookout for lots more shades of green and brown at the moment.

So I was delighted to hear that Always with a Heart and Handy Hippo are running a competition to win 20 pens of your choice from the range.

To read about the competition and enter for yourself, pop over to the Always with a Heart blog but hurry! The competition closes on January 8th. If you're not lucky, you can buy Promarkers and many other craft goodies at Handy Hippo. And I've just spotted that they have a super deal on Nestabilities so I may be adding to my collection.

In the meantime, I have rather a lot of ink to scrub off my fingers!

What will this year bring?

2012-01-03T16:35:00.000Z

Happy New Year everyone.

It's January 3rd, so I'm sure some of you have already broken your resolutions - especially if they involved healthy eating, because with the gale blowing outside as I'm writing this and the rain lashing against the window, comfort food isn't a luxury, it's a NECESSITY. So go on, eat that bar of chocolate, I've given you permission!

Did you make any comping resolutions? Is there anything you really want to win this year? I still haven't won tickets to the Olympic Games, so they are high on my wish list. I once won tickets to the opening ceremony of the World Athletics Championships, when they were held in Seville, and then later won tickets to the opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Games, when they were in Manchester, so it would be perfect if I could win tickets to the opening ceremony of the London Olympics.

Next on my win-shopping list is an iPad. I gave in and bought one for myself this year, but since I started to use it, I have had so many envious looks from my husband that I'm trying to win one for him. The iPad displays photographs beautifully, and if you have ever seen the wonderful photography on his blog, Mark's Veg Plot you'll see how invaluable it would be to him. Here is one of his photos - of the very apt "Grape Vine" cheese plate I won in the recent Waitrose competition.

......and another photo of it after being filled.....

As well as big prizes (cash, a holiday and a car would be lovely!) I'm also trying to win lots of baby things, as my second grandchild is due in April, and craft goodies as I've promised myself I'm not going to buy any this year. I made the "craft ban" resolution last year, and won lots - but even so I didn't manage to keep it for very long. And if I'm lucky enough to win tickets to the "Make It" show in Farnborough next month, I can see my willpower crumbling even faster this year.

My other non-comping resolutions are to make two Christmas cards a week all through the year,which will help to use up some of the card and paper I overspent on last year, and to declutter the house. We're half way through the first week already and I haven't started yet, so maybe I shouldn't be sitting here typing, surrounded by clutter!

Are you a superstitious comper?

2011-12-28T15:32:00.000Z

Winning competitions is usually about luck - even in a competition with an element of skill, there is still some luck involved: you need to be lucky enough to get judges who like your entry better than all the others.

And wherever luck is involved, there are superstitions. So do YOU have any comping superstitions?

Some compers like to send all their postal entries from the same postbox. You may try to argue the logic of it - that one is in a visible spot where it won't get vandalised, or has the most convenient collection times - but I bet that deep down inside something is telling you that you are more likely to win if you post your entries there.

Other people may like to write with a lucky pen, kiss the envelope before posting it, or even walk three times round the post box (TIP: don't try this if it's set into the wall of a building!)

I'm sure lots of us have our own versions of the well-known good and bad luck superstitions, with lucky charms, lucky days of the week to enter and always hoping to see two magpies rather than one. And although you probably keep the toilet lids in your home closed to keep germs and smells shut away, isn't there a little voice in the back of your mind telling you that an open toilet lid drains money from the house?

With more modern comping methods, it's harder to be superstitious, after all a computer is just a machine, but do you arrange your desk a certain way or approach things in a certain order? I know I do - I have a list of bookmarked competitions to enter, and I feel very uncomfortable if for some reason I have to change the order. And if a Captcha word or security code number is one that has special significance for me, I'm absolutely convinced I am going to win! The other day I entered a competition that closes on December 31st, and the security number was my husband's old Army number. If you've ever been in the forces, or married to a member of the forces, you'll know how that number gets etched into your brain! So I am fully expecting a win from that!

Now we are all modern, rational adults and you might think there is no place in your life for lucky charms and superstitions. But there is a lot of evidence to suggest that the luckier we think we are, the luckier we actually ARE. This was demonstrated very well by Dr. Richard Wiseman in his book "The Luck Factor" - for which I was one of the guinea pigs. And while looking for the link to the book for you, I found that there is now a website dedicated to teaching you how to be lucky!http://www.theluckfactor.com/ is the site. I'm going to check it out now and will report back to you in the New Year if I find anything exciting there.

In the meantime, I would love to hear what comping superstitions YOU have and whether they have ever brought you luck on a grand scale.

Photographs courtesy of Valerie Dallimore.

WIN one of the top 5 gadgets of 2011

2011-12-22T13:26:00.000Z

Life is better ON are giving you the chance to win one of the top gadgets of 2011. The prize will be one of the Top 5 devices of 2011 (iPhone 4S, iPad2, Nokia Lumia, Samsung Galaxy S2 or Samsung Galaxy Tab) - whichever turns out to be the most popular.

To enter, pop along to their Facebook page then go to the xMas game and pick your favourite device. Click the "Like" button underneath it, and if the one you have chosen is the one with the most likes at midnight on January 8th, when voting closes, you will be in the draw to win it.

The dinner that was a winner.

2011-12-18T16:58:00.000Z

Back in February 2000 I won one of the best holiday prizes ever, as a result of entering a competition in the Sainsbury's magazine. The task was to answer various questions about Indian food - a passion of mine - and write a tiebreaker, and I was absolutely delighted to learn I was a finalist.

The final involved staying at the Ritz for a night. I have never slept in a bedroom with a real chandelier before! We were greeted with a bowl of fruit and a freshly-ironed copy of the Evening Standard and left to explore our room. The price list for the mini bar and room service made entertaining reading – thank goodness we were being provided with dinner! When we got back to our room after the meal, not only had the bed been turned down, but a little mat had been placed on the floor at each side, with a pair of bedroom slippers on it. They think of everything, don’t they?

The meal itself was absolutely wonderful. I was pleased to see that it was to be all based on Indian food as my husband’s years in the Brigade of Gurkhas had given me a good knowledge of it. The first course was a soup and the questions were “what is the herb” and “what is the cappuccino made from” – the herb was easy, coriander, as my husband is violently allergic to it so I have to be able to recognise it easily. The cappuccino was impossible – by the time everyone had been served, the froth had sunk into the soup and was indistinguishable from the rest.

Next came a risotto of kedgeree, and as well as the spices and variety of rice, we had to identify the fish. Delicate pink strands in it led several people to say salmon, but I managed to isolate a pink piece – it was tomato! The fish was smoked haddock, unnoticed by one or two because it was undyed.

Then came a lime pickle sorbet – powerfully flavoured and an easy one for everybody.

Next a meat dish which stumped us all – it turned out to be lamb, but had no discernible flavour apart from the spices it had been cooked with. The spices in the accompanying chutney were a challenge and left us all struggling – until I finished eating mine and I saw the plate stained bright yellow. I have bleached turmeric stains off my worktops often enough to recognise them anywhere.

Finally a delicious pudding of cardamom ice cream with a ginger dressing – another easy course for all of us.

Before the pudding we were told that two of us were close on points and well ahead of the others, but didn’t say which two it was. I was hopeful though, as from the conversation after each round I seemed to have had the right answers most of the time. However it was still a surprise and an enormous thrill to be awarded the prize!

The officials left soon after the meal, leaving the contestants and partners to gather together all the half-empty decanters of port and settle down for a long chat. It was great to find that there was no animosity from the runners-up.

The prize was a wonderful gourmet trip to India, staying at hotels in Delhi, Shimla, Jaipur and Bombay. I'll tell you more about that another tine.

A bit of festive fun

2011-12-15T14:32:00.000Z

You really don't want to hear anything about comping from me at the moment, do you? Either you've got RSI from trying to enter all the Advent competitions, or you've decided to take a few days off now and prepare for Christmas. So I thiough I'd share a bit of off-topic festive fun with you.

First of all, something that has been around for many years - I first saw it as a badly Xeroxed copy handed round my husband's office about 25 years ago, but it still makes me laugh every time I read it.

CHERRY CHRISTMAS CAKE

Ingredients

1 cup butter 1 cup sugar

4 large eggs                                         1 cup dried fruit
1 teasp baking powder                        1 teasp salt
1 cup brown sugar                               lemon juice
nuts                                                     1 bottle whisky

Method

Sample the whisky to check for quality. Take a large bowl. Check the whisky again to be sure it is of the highest quality. Pour 1 level cup and drink.

Repeat.

Turn on the electric mixer. Beat 1 cup of butter in a large fluffy bowl. Add 1 teaspoon of sugar and beat again. Make sure the whisky is still OK. Try another cup. Turn off the mixer. Break 2 leggs and add to the owl and chuck in the cup of dried fruit. Mix on the turner. If the fruit gets stuck in the beaters, pry it loose with a drewscriver.

Sample the whisky again to check for tonsisticity. Next, sift 2 cups of salt or something. Who cares? Check the whisky. Now sift the lemon juice and strain your nuts. Add one babblespoon of brown sugar, or whatever colour you can find. Wix mell. Grease the oven. Turn the cake pan 350 gredees.

Don’t forget to beat off the burner. Throw the bowl out of the window, check the whisky again and go to bed.

~~~o0o~~~

Next, something far more up to date. I first spotted this last year and thought it extraordinarily clever yet relevant to the season a video on YouTube called "If Jesus were born in times of Google, Facebook and Twitter" - you can see it here http://youtu.be/8gFYzErcweg

Enjoy!

Mud, mud, glorious mud!

2011-12-13T13:22:00.000Z

Have you ever had a prize that has become memorable for the wrong reason? A prize I won a few years ago was a perfect example of this.

The prize was a day of pampering and treatments at a small town-centre health club. I felt a bit uncomfortable when I realised that I was the only customer, but I soon got used to having a team of personal staff and had a wonderfully relaxing day. Until it came to the final treatment…….

The idea was to lie in a bath of water mixed with a bucketful of seaweed puree, and in a darkened room be pummelled by intense underwater jets that moved gradually up and down the body. The beautician said that this would make more blood flow towards my heart (from where exactly???) and collect particles of undigested food on the way, which it would excrete through my lymph glands. I kept as straight a face as I could, while surreptitiously checking my armpits for signs of my lunch emerging.

Despite that, the treatment was very relaxing and I was almost asleep when the new trainee beautician, on her first day at work, came to tell me that my time was up.

“Do I need to switch this machine off?” I asked.

“No,” she replied, “the beautician will be along soon to do that,” and departed to let me dress in privacy.

However the underwater jets were stronger than I thought – just as I finished dressing, the ones which should have been pummelling my back started up, squirting half a dozen powerful jets of seaweed slurry straight into the air! I was soaked, and the walls and ceiling were covered in a thick brown sludge – oozing down the walls and dripping off the pictures and mirrors!

Thank goodness it was my last treatment, I couldn’t get away fast enough! And something tells me that the trainee beautician was probably not far behind me!

Image: think4photop / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Don't be a Bad Egg on Twitter

2011-12-09T16:08:00.000Z

Are you a comper? Do you have an avatar on Twitter, or do you still use the egg picture you were given when you signed up?

If you are still an egg, you might be surprised to learn that it might be reducing the number of competitions that you win. This is because most people on Twitter, including many of those who run competitions, believe that if you haven't personalised your account, you are

a) brand new to Twitter, possibly having only set up the account to enter that particular competition
or
b) too lazy to change it, in which case why should they make the effort to give you a prize
or
c) a spammer - all those "throwaway" accounts that send you the dodgy "Free Starbucks gift card" and "Free iPad contest" tweets have egg avatars. Spammers with egg avatars are getting into such a problem on Twitter that many people hit the "Block and report spam" button as soon as they see a tweet from an egg, so you could be a genuine person and find yourself blocked.

Now I'm not saying that everyone takes that attitude, but why not take a few minutes to make sure that NOBODY ever deletes your entry just because you look like an egg?

Not everyone want to show their face to the world, so here are some ideas for pictures you might use.

a picture of something you would like to win. A lot of compers believe this can bring them luck - why not give it a try?
a picture of a family pet.
one of your holiday photos
a close up of a flower
something relevant to the current season - for instance a Christmas Tree or the Easter bunny

Have fun thinking of something. Try to make it something that will make your tweets instantly recognisable, so everyone will know it is you. Don't choose a copyright image, such as a Disney character or a photo you've seen on somebody's blog, without permission from the owner.

To change your avatar, log in to your Twitter account and go to the arrowhead to the top right, by your name. Choose "Settings" from the drop down menu then go to the "Profile" tab. Use the Browse button to choose a picture from your computer, and once it appears in the box, click "Save" at the bottom of the screen. It may be a few minutes before your tweets start to show up with your new picture, and you may need to send a few tweets, but once it starts to appear, you won't be a Bad Egg any more!

Win Strictly Live tour tickets!

2011-12-08T15:48:00.000Z

If you are a fan of Strictly Come Dancing - and I know that a lot of you are - you'll be pleased to learn that Hotels4U are giving you a chance to win tickets to see the tour next year. Shows are to be held in London, Birmingham, Nottingham, Manchester, Sheffield, Liverpool, Newcastle, Glasgow, Cardiff, Dublin and Belfast. One lucky person will win a pair of tickets to their choice of venues on the tour.
To enter, you will need to like their Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/hotels4ucom then click on the "Win....." button in the left hand menu and answer one simple question.

But hurry! The competition closes at 11am on Monday December 12th.

And on the 13th, they will be launching a "12 Days of Christmas" competition, so look out for that too.

Win one of 5 pushchairs from Silver Cross

2011-12-07T17:56:00.001Z

Silver Cross have gone all out on their last competition before Christmas and are giving away five Pop Classic pushchairs (which comes with a cup holder, harness pads, ventilated raincover, shopping basket and carry handle).

It's the same entry process as the two previous competition as to enter you have to like their Facbook page then go to the competition tab then answer the simple Christmassy themed question.

The competition lasts until 3pm on Friday 16th December 2011 and you can read the full terms and conditions here

Good luck - but save one for me. If you also read Mellow Mummy, my daughter's blog, you'll know I'm going to be a grandma again in the spring so I'd love to win one of these.

Those boomerang postcards!

2011-12-06T17:43:00.000Z

Have you ever had a boomerang postcard? That is, one that you've sent off for a competition, but comes back to your own address instead? They are annoying, aren't they - and expensive too, as the stamp has often been franked when it comes back to you, so just popping it back in the postbox might not work as the recipient might be asked to pay a surcharge, and refuse the delivery. Also, sometimes it takes so long for these boomerangs to come back to you that it's too late to send it again - the closing date has already gone.

When it happens, you might be lucky enough to get a refund of the cost of the stamp, if you complain to your local Post Office. If they are feeling very generous, they might give you a whole BOOK of stamps. But of course that won't compensate you for missing out on the prize that you could have won if the card had reached its destination.

So here are a few tips to help to make sure your cards go where they are intended to, and don't come flocking back like homing pigeons.

First of all, remember that most post is sorted by machinery these days. The "magic eye" in it isn't trained to look for words like "to" and "from", so most of the time putting those on your card doesn't help. All it looks for is the postcode. And it expects to see that clearly and boldly written, on a line on its own, at the very bottom of the address. So when you are writing the address you are sending to, make sure that it really is as clear and distinct as it can be.

Now turn your attention to your own details on the other side of the card. This time you want the sorting machinery (which apparently isn't clever enough to think "Oh, the stamp is on the other side so that must be where the card is going to" - something that would solve all our problems) to be as confused as possible and miss spotting your postcode. The first thing you can do to help is to turn your postcard through a right angle and have the short edges at the top and bottom. As it goes through the machine with the long edges top and bottom, your postcode will seem to be sideways on to it, so it won't be able to read it.
Then make sure the postcode isn't on the bottom line. Put something underneath it - your phone number, your email address, the answer to the competition question if there is one, or even a pattern of pretty squiggles! You could also put your postcode on the same line as your county, if the card is wide enough.

If you are using picture postcards with all your writing on one side, your finished card would look like this. Note how the sender's own details are as low down the card as possible, so that they don't get obscured by the postmark. If your card is drawn as a winner and they can't read your address, they'll have to throw it away and draw a different winner!

All this is good practice anyway as it makes your card clear and easy to read for the promoter as well as the Post Office. It won't guarantee that your cards don't come back to you, but it will make sure it happens less often.

But there is one way to make sure your cards DO come back to you, and I experienced it just yesterday. I picked up the mail and there was a boomerang card among it, so I started to get angry and turned the card over to see which competition I'd lost out on. Yes, the card was stamped, but I'd been in such a hurry to post my entry that I had completely forgotten to write the address it was supposed to go to. Please don't ever do that!

Blip your way to a win!

2011-12-03T16:12:00.000Z

Technology is moving frighteningly fast these days, and every time something new turns up, it isn't long before promoters start to use it to run competitions. One of the latest innovations sees competitions being run through apps for smart phones and iPads.

The last few weeks have seen prizes being offered through apps from Black & Decker, Richer Sounds and Wetherspoons - all of which are still running as I write this. I'm afraid I only have links to the Apple versions and don't know whether they produce versions for other phones.

Latest on the scene is a fun app called BlippAR which comes in Apple and Android versions and can be used on a phone or an iPad, although the larger screen of the iPad gives more dramatic results. You simply open the app and hold the camera of your device over the item to be "Blipped" and information about the product, links to online content, recipes and even competitions appear on the screen as if by magic!

Here I am blipping a jar of Marmite - can you see how the link to the recipes has appeared over the image of the jar on the screen? All I needed to do after that was touch the screen and I was taken to a selection of tasty recipes.

But I know that you are probably not here to read about Marmite Omelettes, you are thinking, "But where are the comps?"

Well right now, if you blip a bottle of Heinz tomato ketchup, you could instantly win one of two packs of Heinz branded kitchen goodies every day until January 19th. You can enter once a day and I entered early in the morning and won a pack while I was testing it for this article.

And if you blip the cover of the new album Now 80 you could win one of 80 prizes, from a signed iPad to a Spotify subscription. Unfortunately the terms of this competition aren't working at the moment so I can't tell you when it closes.

The really good news is, you don't always need to have the product to hand - the BlippAR Facebook page often puts blippable photos of the products up for you to try, or, as you can see from the photo above, you can simply search the web for a decent photo of the product and try blipping that. It worked from me, when I wanted to enter the Now 80 competition.

Your Blippar app has a catalogue of things that are currently blippable, and updates with any new ones each time you open it, and new ones are announced on the Facebook page too. Another current blipping competition is the Mercedes Benz "Escape the Map" game - there are no photos of it here because I can't make head nor tail of it! And I believe there has also been a competition in Metro.

It's incredibly easy to use, great fun and trying out new blips can be quite addictive! One more tool to add to your comping kit.

What on Earth were you looking for?

2011-12-02T18:38:00.000Z

I can't resist looking at the search terms that people have used to find this blog, and recently have chatted to a few other bloggers who do the same. Sometimes I wonder what they were REALLY looking for - and whether they found it here or went away disappointed. If you are a blogger, do you do the same? I'd love to hear about the terms that were used to find your blogs!

Obviously the most frequently used terms are to do with competitions. And judging by the number of people who come here by searching for "Competitors Journal" there are a lot of us older compers who still have very fond memories of the magazine.

People looking for help with Twitter also regularly find their way here, with searches such as

how to get out of Twitter jail
blocking on Twitter, how it works
what does "dm your address mean", and
what does #followfriday mean

Captcha code queries also bring quite a few visitors, as do gardening queries about growing grape vines (I'm very sorry to disappoint you if that's why you are here but here's a bunch of grapes for you to look at).

But some of the more unusual searches that have brought people here are

rising taste
1950s image source
Ireland souvenir shops
grape design on a plate
comebacks for "don't do as I do, do as I say"

and one that really puzzles me, especially as it seems to have been used several times

sex hotel roof vancouver

I promise you, you can search every single post on this blog and while I HAVE written about a trip to Vancouver, I didn't make any mention of sex on the hotel roof! But, for those who might get excited by the thought, here is a photo of a hotel in Vancouver. I'll leave the rest up to your imagination.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas

2011-12-01T17:17:00.001Z

.... and a a comper, we all know what that means - ADVENT COMPETITIONS!

I'm not going to make a list, because that has been so expertly done by two of the biggest and best websites for compers. So I'll recommend that you look here for the Loquax one and here for the Prizefinder one. Both are excellent lists and thoroughly well researched and I'll certainly be referring to them many times over the next 24 days. There seem to be more than ever before this year!

So since I'm not making a list (and checking it twice) I have shared a few photos of my hand made Christmas cards with you, and I'll give you a few tips for coping with the Advent comping mania.

First of all, allow yourself a set amount of time for Advent competitions, and no more. It might be an hour, it might be half a day - just don't let it take over your whole day. Entering every single one would be impossible!
Once you've read through the list of competitions, choose the ones that interest you most. If there's a baby in the family, or a teenager, there will be some that are aimed at people like you. Pick ones with prizes that match your hobbies and interests. When your time is limited, it's not worth spending time on the Your Cat Advent if you aren't a cat lover! I plan to pick 15-20 competitions and concentrate my efforts on those.
Don't enter the competitions first thing in the morning or last thing at night. Some of them are only open during office hours - a problem for people out at work all day - and some are manually updated every day so aren't ready until the person responsible has got to work and had their first coffee of the day. If you try to enter at 6am (my preferred time!) you will waste a lot of time going to sites that are still showing the previous day's competition.
Don't have too high expectations. We compers love this time of year, so lots of us enter the Advent competitions, so don't expect a huge number of prizes to suddenly come rolling in. And bear in mind that although some are drawn, and winners contacted, daily, some promoters leave everything set to run automatically while they cope with the Christmas rush, and don't draw winners until the New Year. My personal record for a late Advent notification is March!
Remember that lots of other competitions are still running! Because it is such a busy time of year, and many compers are concentrating on either their own Christmas plans or the dozens of Advent competitions, other competitions can be neglected and see entry numbers falling dramatically. And low entry numbers mean good odds.

Finally, having said I am not making a list, I HAVE made a little list of sorts. It's a Twitter list, and I'm hoping to add to it all the Twitter pages that are running Advent competitions. It's still very much a work in progress, but you can follow it here

How to comment on a blog post

2011-11-28T16:35:00.000Z

Many Grape Vine readers are new to the world of blogs, and some of you have never visited any other blogs, or commented on them, but there are so many lovely competitions being run by lovely, friendly bloggers that it really is well worth joining in. Not only do you stand a better chance of winning than you do in many other kinds of competition, but you could get to know some interesting new people too. The majority of blogs are run by individuals and one-person businesses, so there isn't the "facelessness" of simply filling in a form on a website or writing your details on a postcard.

But when I have run competitions here on the blog, a few Grape Vine readers have told me that they didn't know how to comment. Go on, you old blogging hands who are tittering behind your hands now, you must have been first timers once! Today's advice is for the newbies who may, one day, be as experienced as you are!

First of all, a blog is different from a website and often the blogger doesn't have much control over the form that they use. So some blogs - this one included - don't have a box to collect your email address. This means that unless they are using a widget like the Rafflecopter one I have used for recent competitions, the blog owner will need a way to contact you if you win.

One way to do this is to sign up for a Google account. You can do this at www.plus.google.com or by clicking on the "Join this site with Google friend Connect" button that you will see on the right of many blogs. Once you have signed up, go to your dashboard and choose "privacy" and tick the box marked "Show my email address". That won't show it to the whole world, but if you have followed a blog and then win a competition on it, the blogger will be able to email you to tell you that you have won.

If you don't want to do that, and have a Twitter account, you can use that as a way to be contacted. Just put your Twitter name in your comment.

If you don't have either of these ways top be contacted, you may want to give your email address in your comment. But please, don't write it in its usual form. There are computers set up to search the internet for email addresses that appear anywhere public, and when they find them, they deluge them with spam. You don't want that to happen, so write it in a way that a computer can't recognise. The most popular way to do this, and one that most bloggers will understand, is to replace the @ sign with the word AT.

Right, we've worked out how you can be contacted when you win, now we need to find out how you are going to actually make that comment! First of all, make sure you are reading the specific post rather than the whole blog. To do this, click on the subject line at the top of the post you are reading, for instance "How to comment on a blog post" at the top of this one. Next look for the words "comment on this post" or "post a comment". They will usually be at the very bottom of the post, but occasionally right at the top. Sometimes you need to scroll a long way down, past other comments, to find them. On the Grape Vine blog, scroll right past the end of the post and past the "You might also like" suggestions and you will see a box to write your comment in. On some blogs, instead of the box, there will be a link: click on it and the box will appear in a pop-up window.

Write your comment in the box, making sure that if there is a question, you have answered it correctly, and if necessary, left a way to contact you as described above. Then select "Google ID" if you have one, or otherwise "anonymous" from the drop down menu, and click on "Post comment". On some blogs you will be given a Captcha code to fill in before your comment is complete.

Once that is done, your comment will appear immediately, or a little while later after the blog owner has approved it. There is one final thing to do if you are entering a competition that uses a Rafflecopter widget, and that is to go back to the widget and click "I did this" next to the "Leave a comment" option. The widget will collect your email address safely and securely so you won't need to worry about spammers.

If you are new to commenting on blogs, why not try it out here? Just say Hello, tell me what you want for Christmas, tell me about the weather - just say SOMETHING so that next time you see a competition that asks you to comment on a blog, you won't think "I can't do that, I've never commented on a blog". And as I check all comments before they are posted, I promise I won't allow your comment to appear if you have accidentally included your email address.

And then why not take a look at some of the lovely blogs on "My Blog List" on the lower right of this page, where you might find some competitions to make a start on!

Win some gorgous treats for the babies in your life!

2011-11-24T10:00:00.000Z

Silver Cross has another wonderful competition for us. This time they are giving away the whole of their Owl and the Pussycat range - a massive bundle of treats consisting of:

Owl & the Pussycat Musical Waterball

Owl & the Pussycat First Year Picture Frame

Owl & the Pussycat Moneybox

2 x Owl & the Pussycat Trinket Boxes

Owl & the Pussycat Musical Ball

Owl & the Pussycat Owl Rattle Set

Pussycat Rattle Set

Owl Comforter

Owl Hug Toy

Pussycat Hug Toy

Owl Beanie

Pussycat Hug Toy

Owl Beanie

Pussycat Beanie

Boat Beanie

All you need to do to enter is head over to their Facebook page, "Like" the page if you don't already (I expect most of you already like it because of the beautiful doll's pram competition they ran recently!) and answer the simple question on the Competition tab. The competition closes on December 2nd.

My day in Reading - what a lot of new competitions!

2011-11-23T12:04:00.002Z

Grape Vine readers, and others who have read my "A day in the life..." post, will know that I try to have at least one day a week devoted entirely to visiting as many shops as possible in search of new competitions. Some days they are utter failures and I come home with nothing at all, but most trips yield a fair crop of new competitions. However yesterday I staggered home with a bumper bundle of new competitions, and some of them close very soon so read on for more information. For anything you need to act on before the next issue of Grape Vine comes out, the information you need is given here.

This week for my "safari" I drove to Reading and parked in the Oracle centre, so my first stop was the shopping centre there. Although these competitions were found in Reading, they should be available in branches of the same stores all over the country.

Shoon had an entry form with their Ecco Gore-Tex shoes - simply try a pair on to be given an entry form to hand in for a draw to win a trip to the Ice Hotel. Closing 30 Nov.

The Fenn Wright Manson concession in House of Fraser had a form to hand in for a draw to win £500 worth of gift vouchers and £500 of diamond jewellery, closing 11 Dec.

Also in House of Fraser, the Triumph lingerie department had a form to hand in when you bought any item of Triumph lingerie, for a chance to win a trip on the Orient Express, closing 31 Dec.

Heading on through the centre, I passed Disney store where the Gift List competition closes on 27 Nov and New Look where store card holders will be given a lucky treat envelope every time they make a purchase of £30 or more, until 15 Dec. Each envelope will contain a treat ranging from a discount voucher to a holiday. Ernest Jones had a comp with GC watches, closing 16 Dec (for full details, see the December Grape Vine).

H Samuel had a form to hand in for a chance to win a Chamilia bangle, closing 04 Dec and Hush Puppies had one to hand in to win a pair of shoes a month for a year (oh, yes please!) closing 31 Dec. Another form to hand in in L'Occitane - sign up to their mailing list for a chance to win a £500 hamper. No closing date was given.

The Bank Fashion catalogue contains several competitions, all closing in December and January, while the Office one directs you to www.office.co.uk/competitions/merrellaw11 for a chance to win a chalet holiday in the french Alps,closing 31 Nov.

Moss Bros have posters advertising a competition to win a 40" LCD TV and Blu-ray home entertainment system and a digital camera, with 10 runners up getting a digital camera and a copy of the film The Hangover Part II. Closing 11 Dec.

In Debenhams the Virgin Travel shop had a form to hand in for a chance to win £1,000 off your next holiday, closing 30 Nov.

My final stop in the Oracle was HMV where I bought a copy of the DVD Top Gear At The Movies which had a sticker on the outside saying "Win a trip to the Valencia Grand Prix". Apparently the comp details are on the DVD, so as it doesn't close until 22 Mar I've not watched it yet. I was pleased to find that the DVD case also contains a comp to win a Smart TV, which also closes next March.

Out into the town centre itself, to hand in my own entry for the Clas Ohlsen competition. Check your November Grape Vine update for a reminder of the details - it closes on 10 Dec.

High and Mighty menswear shop had a form to hand in to enter a draw for £1,000 to spend in store, closing 29 Feb. A few doors along, Jessops catalogue features two rather specialised photography competitions.

In Hawkins Bazaar you are given an entry form when you spend at least £10. Fill it in there and then and return it to the assistant for entry into a draw to win £1,000, closing on Christmas Eve. The Modelzone catalogue says there is a Christmas competition in store with £100 and 5 x £20 vouchers to be won, but all I could find was their usual monthly draw for £50 of vouchers. And talking of catalogues, the JD Sports catalogue contains a competition to win a trip to next year's Snowbombing Festival, closing 31 Dec.

In the Altimus store, the Paramó catalogue contains a comp to win walking equipment, closing 01 Feb and a reminder of the ongoing Nikwax competition.

Having exhausted the town centre, I drove on to some of the out of town retail parks. First stop was Toys'R'Us to spend some gift vouchers I had won. The assistant persuaded me to take up the offer of a Gold Card loyalty card, and I'm glad I did as registering it online at www.toysrus.co.uk/register gets you entered into a draw to win a £500 trolley dash, closing 30 Nov.

Then on to Hobbycraft where, as usual, I spent far too much. Luckily there was a money-off voucher in the latest issue of their magazine, which also is giving away a trip to the Ice Hotel - head over to www.bluedoor-media.co.uk/lapland to enter. Closing 30 Nov. There are other giveaways in the mag, which will be listed in the December GV.

My next stop was Tesco where I picked up a pack of Sugar Puffs with a competition on them to win one of 40 x Wii and 5,010 x Skylanders characters. This closes 30 Sep 2012. A few other on-pack competitions I spotted turned out to have closed, but a leaflet promoting the Tesco credit cardhad details of a draw to win back the cost of Christmas. closing 05 Jan, and one at the Tesco Pharamacy had a draw to win a holiday to Lapland, closing 31 Dec.

By this time the sky had turned black and it was about to pour with rain, so, with a quick glance in The Range and Majestic Wine to see if either had any new competitions (they didn't) I headed home. But my day wasn't over - I had to sort through all the Christmas brochures and catalogues I had picked up to see if any of them contained competitions, and then open lots of mail for the London Competitors Club of which I am Membership Secretary. It is renewals time and renewals are flooding in thick and fast.

When my husband got home he said, "Have you done anything today?"
"Oh," I replied, "Just the usual....."

CLOSED Win the DSA car and bike books - and you could win a car!

2011-11-16T17:07:00.002Z

Every year, the DSA runs two tiebreaker competitions, one in their range of books for car drivers and one in the books for motorcyclists. The prize in the car books is a car - a Peugeot 107 or similar car - and the prize in the bike books is £1,000 worth of bike clothing. You have plenty time to think of your tiebreakers - the competitions don't close until the end of 2012!

Together, the two books would set you back £27.98 but I am giving you the chance to win them BOTH. Just go to the Rafflecopter widget below and follow the instructions.

Oh, and make sure you DO follow the instructions! Last time I used Rafflecopter for a competition, some of you thought you would take short cuts by filling in the pop-up forms but not actually doing the actions. Well, if you do that, it might look as if you have entered - but when it comes to drawing the winner, your entries show up as not being valid (this is the same with all rafflecopter competitions, whichever blog you enter them on).

UK entrants only, please, and the competition will close at midnight on Monday 28th November. Note that as comments are moderated, you may not see yours appear immediately. I might be asleep, or out looking for new competitions for Grape Vine..... or something..... but unless your comment is inappropriate it will appear eventually.

Thank you all for entering this competition which is now CLOSED. The winner is

Option: Follow @janesgrapevine on Twitter

Extra Info: @clarateddy

Well done!

My VIP trip to Masterchef Live

2011-11-14T15:27:00.000Z

This time last year, I was delighted to win a pair of tickets to the BBC Good Food Show in Birmingham. While I was at the show, I popped my details on an entry card and posted it in a box by the entrance, for a competition to win tickets to Masterchef Live in London this year. There must have been tens of thousands of entries, so I was delighted to get a phone call earlier this year to say I was the winner.

The prize consisted of VIP tickets for four people on two days, front row tickets for all four of us to two of the Chefs Theatre performances, a night in a hotel and £500 of spending money. The show ran from 11-13 November and we took the prize trip on the 11th and 12th.

On arriving at the show, we made our way to the VIP lounge, a room set aside just for people with VIP tickets, where we were given shopping bags and show guides and £20 each of tokens to use in the restaurant area. The lounge was a comfortable, spacious place where we could safely leave coats and shopping, relax with a cup of tea and a snack - or even a glass of champagne - and enjoy talks and demonstrations specially laid on for VIP visitors. There were even a few VIP only competitions! It would have been quite possible to spend all our time at the show in there, but we were anxious to get out and see what the show had to offer.

Tim Anderson cooks against Phil Vickery, hosted by John Torode and Greg Wallace

Masterchef Live doesn't have as many "big business" exhibitors as the Good Food Show, the emphasis is much more on the demonstrations which took place at several places in the hall, and on the restaurant area where small dishes typical of the menus of a dozen top London restaurants were on sale. The upstairs gallery was host to scores of stalls from small producers and I was delighted to meet up with friends from Twitter such as Kate from Gower Cottage brownies, the lovely boys from Daas beer and former Masterchef finalist Tim Kinnaird.

Also upstairs was a large hall hosting the Wine Show - tasting glasses and highly tasteful glass holders to hang around our necks were also included in our VIP bags.

Masterchef winner 2011, Tim Anderson

One of the joys of having a two day ticket was that on the first day we didn't need to do any shopping.We could look around the stalls (and of course enter the competitions) without having to juggle bags and boxes. As we left at the end of the first day, we were given VIP goody bags crammed with samples, recipe books and packs of biscuits.

me with Marcus Bean, last year's winner of Iron Chef UK, and Michael Caines

The second day was a repeat of the first, with more shopping bags, show guides, goody bags and meal tokens, but this time with an added treat - the PR lady looking after us had managed to arrange for us to have our lunch in the Green Room where all the celebrity chefs went to chill out between performances. There we were lucky enough to meet Michael Caines, this year's Masterchef winner Tim Anderson and Plenty's own Superstar, Juan Sheet!

My life is complete, I've been hugged by Juan Sheet!

Some lovely wins for Grape Vine readers!

2011-11-13T14:52:00.000Z

Readers of Grape Vine love to be winners! And each month, they can notify me of any wins worth £500 or more that they have had, so they can appear on the Winners List on the front cover. At the end of each year, every entry on the list goes into a draw to win a 6 month extension to their subscription and 100 second class stamps.

I love to hear of the wins that readers have had, and other readers say that hearing about big wins and hoping that they, too, can be a "Cover star" spurs them on to try harder with their own comping. Yes, reading about other compers' success really CAN make you a winner.

So here, to inspire you all, is a list of the big wins sent in by Grape Vine readers in just one month, October 2011.

£500 – Chicago Town pizza

VIP meet and greet with The Saturdays

Olympics trip – Morrisons/Cadburys

£2,800 – Dickinson’s Real Deal

weekend in Hull – New! Magazine

washing machine – Waitrose/Persil

weekend in London – OK magazine

£1,000 of toys – Mattesons text comp

£500 hotel voucher – Hello magazine

luxury break in St Andrews – OK magazine

VIP trip to Aegon Masters tennis (£800)

trip to Lapland –Clas Ohlssen

£10,000 of gadgets – Currys

VIP trip to music awards with helicopter tour, lunch at the Ivy, night at the Dorchester and more – web comp

tickets to Coast anniversary meal and choice of dress – Coast

TV, Blu-ray player and more – Sci-Fi Now

year’s fuel (paid as a cheque) – BP

Designer mirror (over £1,100) – blog comp

Holiday to Grenada – Daily Mirror

Spa break – Boots/Dove

£500 rug – Norfolk magazine

Well done again to anyone who recognises their win here. The Winners List is only open to current Grape Vine subscribers - see here http://competitiongrapevine.blogspot.com/p/how-to-subscribe-to-grape-vine.html for details of how to subscribe.

And look out very soon for an account of a recent big win of my own - a VIP trip to Masterchef Live!

What do you REALLY think of Jeremy Clarkson?

2011-11-10T14:32:00.000Z

He's the Marmite Man - you either love him or hate him Or do you? Everyone has their own views on Jeremy Clarkson, not all of them charitable.

Experience Mad would like to know just what you DO think of him, and in return for completing their very short survey they are giving you the chance to win a driving experience in a Ferrari 360, Aston Martin DB9 or V8 Vantage, Lamborghini Gallardo and Porsche 911.

To give your opinion and enter the draw, pop over to www.experiencemad.co.uk/competition. The survey closes at the end of November so that the results will be out in time for the Top Gear Christmas Special.

AN EARLY CHRISTMAS TREAT FOR MUMS AND DADS! WIN Christmas Gifts for your family, your friends and YOU!

2011-11-08T15:15:00.000Z

www.SupportiveBusinessMums.co.uk has put together a fabulous online Christmas Gift Guide complete with ideal Christmas Gift Ideas for all the family, reviews and recommendations, great small gift business features and best of all... Christmas Gift Give Aways with gifts up to £100 each plus exclusive offers and discount codes!

Supportive Business Mums was founded by Ces Loftus, a designer, brand buzz creator and work from home mum. Ces says : "Christmas Shopping can be stressful as well as time consuming and costly. I have put together a great selection of ideal gift ideas, all from small businesses as opposed to the high street and offering some great discounts and special offers too. We have some awesome prizes up for grabs and all you have to do is visit the online features, click through to the sites you are interested in, then comment on the Christmas Guide Blog to say which products are on your Christmas Wish List! You double your chances of winning by sharing the Gift Guide page on twitter and facebook. An early Christmas treat ready to make your life easier and save you some money!"

Do you want to win a gorgeous gift for yourself and have gifts for family and friends sorted too?

Quick, get over to http://www.supportivebusinessmums.co.uk/christmas-gift-guide/ there are so many fabulous gifts including, clothes, shoes, bags, jewellery, bath and beauty products, pamper products, candles and homewares, art, personalised gifts, cards and paper, books, novelties, stocking fillers and toys to be won!

If you have a small business selling products suitable for Christmas Gifts and would like a free feature on their guide then contact Ces Loftus by email at ces@creativelyminded.co.uk

NOW GO and WIN yourself something fabulous! Good Luck Everyone!

http://www.supportivebusinessmums.co.uk/christmas-gift-guide/

Do you know Britain's luckiest person?

2011-11-07T14:39:00.000Z

Do you know Britain's luckiest person? Or maybe you feel YOU deserve that description? A journalist called James Tegerdine is looking for someone who fits that description, or someone who makes a living out of winning competitions, for a story which would be published in newspapers and other publications all over the world.

If you would be interested in letting him interview you, or know somebody else who might (but please get their permission first!) please get in touch with him at James@catersnews.com - and tell him that you were sent by Jane Willis of Grape Vine so he knows right away which feature you are talking about.

Jane

Some competitions that just missed Grape Vine

2011-11-04T14:08:00.028Z

Printing deadlines being what they are, occasionally a new competition appears after Grape Vine has gone out, yet closes too soon to be included in the update.

Here are two that did that this month.

The first was found in Asda, a small tear-off pad by tins of pre-mixed Southern Comfort. The leaflet directs you to www.fb.com/southerncomfortuk where you will find the instant win promotion; play the game for a chance to win one of 100 sets of 4 tickets to the Juke Joint party on November 17th. The site says there is also an instant win promotion connected with free voodoo hats given out when you buy a Southern Comfort in participating pubs. Both close November 14th.

The second is at Sainsburys. Swipe your Nectar card when buying any of the following:
- All Coke, Powerade and Glaceau Vitamin Water drinks
- All Cadbury 120g, 140g and 230g bars
- All P&G products including Pampers, Head &Shoulders, Gillette and Fairy
- All Heineken lager
- Selected fresh fruit and vegetables.
to be automatically entered into a draw to win one of 1,500 family tickets to the Paralympic Games. You will get one entry for each product you buy, but can only win one prize per Nectar card. This closes 15 November.

Hand made Thursday - a wedding card

2011-11-03T21:51:00.000Z

This weekend I am going to the wedding of the daughter of two of my oldest friends. We've known Philippa since she was a tiny tot - not right since her birth, as we lived overseas for the first year of her life. But we are practically courtesy Aunt and Uncle to her. So I wanted to make her a really special wedding card. And as almost always when a very special, keepsake card is what I want to produce, the Bookatrix embossing board was called into action.

This time I cut one of the pages twice, once in card and once in acetate, then cut out the centre of the card one to reveal the acetate windows below and the patterned paper (won in a Twitter competition!) in the layer below. The windows were finished with peel offs and a stand made from matching patterned paper. The little rosebuds finishing the corners look flat in the photo but in fact are quite deep. They came from a Hot Off The Press kit.

I neede to make sure it didn't get damaged in the post so I made a matching box.

This post is for the Handmade Thursday linky at White Lily Green

Win a lovely treat for Peppa Pig fans

2011-11-03T15:02:00.000Z

The latest competition on the Tesco books blog is for one of 5 Peppa Pig bundles. They include a copy of Peppa Pig Time for a Story, Peppa Pig Pirate Island Sound Book and the Peppa Pig 'International Day' DVD.

To enter, simply pop over to the blog post here and tell them which animal you would like to be, if you could, and why. You can get extra entries by asking your children which animals they would like to be too. The competition closes on Friday 18th November.

And here is my granddaughter Lara, on a day trip to Peppa Pig world, wearing her favourite hat - a Peppa Pig one of course!

Win six months subscription to Grape Vine

2011-11-01T12:58:00.000Z

Do you know that the Grape Vine website has its own monthly competition, with a six months subscription to be won every month?

Last month, there were 383 entries, but 66 of these were disqualified for not following the instructions. So make sure you read carefully and do what it says, not what you THINK it says. The task was set up to trick spammers, not humans, but it's surprising how many humans are caught out too!

Multiple entrants had their first entry allowed, but subsequent ones were disqualified.

To enter, just pop over to this page and fill in the form. This month's competition closes on November 30th.

While you are there, why not request a FREE sample copy of Grape Vine? Anyone who has never had a copy before can request a free copy - but hurry! Stocks of the November issue are already limited!

Hawaii Five-0 winner and feedback

2011-10-30T08:02:00.000Z

Thank you for all your entries to the Hawaii Five-0 competition. The winner was entry #71 from Phil Holland. You can see the "Rafflecopter" announcement of the winner on the original post
http://competitiongrapevine.blogspot.com/2011/10/win-hawaii-five-o-dvd-box-set.html

I loved reading all your entries, and they reminded me of all sorts of programmes I had forgotten about. I can see I'm going to be thumbing through the TV guides to see what's on the channels that specialise in "Golden Oldies".

My personal favourites were Monty Python's Flying Circus in the early 1970s and Butterflies in the late 70s/early 80s. There, I bet you were all expecting me to anme a cookery show like Delia or the Galloping Gourmet weren't you?

Now a bit of feedback about the Rafflecopter system. When there is a Rafflecopter entry system - that's the big box on the page with the "I did this" buttons next to the tasks, you MUST use it. The draw is done using the information submitted through this box, and if you just comment on the blog or on Twitter or Facebook without also sending your details through the "I did this" button, you aren't included in the draw.

Also if you say that you have commented, followed or tweeted but don't actually DO it - Rafflecopter knows! The person runing the comp sees a list of everyone who has entered and what they have actually done, so I'm afraid those of you who tried to save time by just clicking the "I did this" button and not actually doing the task weren't included in the draw either. Neither were those who had simply seen somebody else's entry tweet on Twitter and copied it or Rt'd it - they didn't come to the blog and tell Rafflecopter that had entered, so they weren't in the draw.

Rafflecopter is very easy to use, if you simply click on each step in turn and follow the instructions there, and as it makes it so much easier for people running blog competitions to do them safely and securely, being able to communicate with entrants and winners without them having to risk exposing personal details like email addresses publicly on the web, we're going to be seeing a lot more of them.

I'll be running more comps using it in the future, to help compers get to grips with it. And do please feel free to ask me any questions you have about the system, whether you are a comper who wants to enter a competition run this way or a blogger who would like to run one. I'll do my very best to answer!

Getting hold of those elusive till receipts.

2011-10-25T17:38:00.000+01:00

Have you ever seen a competition entry form - or even just heard of the form but not got hold of it - and thought , "I would love to enter that but I can't get hold of the till receipt I need."? Maybe you are house bound, or live somewhere the shop running the competition has no branches? Or simply haven't time to visit a range of different shops?

Well, now there is a solution to your problem. Jenni Bower-Tebbs, a Grape Vine reader who has been running a popular entry form supply service for many years, is starting up a qualifier buying service.

The way it works is that you send her a stamped, addressed envelope plus enough unused, loose postage stamps to cover the price of the product plus a little extra to cover her petrol costs when she goes shopping. She will buy you the product and use your SAE send you the till receipt and an entry form - two entry forms if she has enough, so you have one for your records. She then keeps the product itself as her payment for the service.

To start with and see what the response is, she is offering to get the products for the Morrisons/Heinz "Win your grocery shopping for life" competition.

The prize is £10,000 in Morrisons vouchers and a whopping £65,000 in cash, and the task is simply to fill in your details on the entry form and enclose a Morrisons till receipt for any Heinz, HP or Lea & Perrins product.

Jenni will supply the till receipt for the price of 3 x 1st class stamps, plus of course your SAE. She will take requests for other Morrisons receipts and if the service proves popular, will extend to other supermarkets and stores.

As Jenni has no computer or email account, I can't give you an email address to contact her, and I didn't want to post her home address publicly on the blog. I know all you compers are lovely people, but sadly blogs can be read by some very UNlovely people too! So if you would like to take up the offer, please email me at janesgrapevine@yahoo.co.uk with the subject TR SERVICE and I will tell you where to send your SAE and stamps.

If you are a Grape Vine reader, there is no need to email me, you will find Jenni's address in the "IN - TO - WIN" advert on the back page of every copy of Grape Vine.

IN - TO - WIN is Jenni's entry form service - she can supply single or monthly packs of entry forms. A single pack costs £5, 3 months £12, 6 months £20 and 12 months £35, with cheques payable to Mrs J Bower-Tebbs. Again, email me for her address if you would like to give it a try!

Win....... EVERYTHING!

2011-10-24T18:12:00.002+01:00

I Want One of Those, affectionately known by many as IWOOT, is a website that sells an amazing array of unusual and quirky gifts and accessories, ranging from a talking meerkat to a wine chilling fridge. Toys, gifts, games consoles, experience days - they have a gift for every taste and every budget.

In fact they have so many gifts to choose from it can be hard to make up your mind. So how about simply having one of everything? Yes, every item they sell, that's over 2,350 products. To buy them would cost you more than £85,000 but they are giving you the chance to WIN one of everything they sell. That's all one prize, a whole lorry load of goodies including enough experience days to keep you busy every weekend for a year, games consoles, an iPad, fancy dress costumes and even some Christmas Pudding bin bags!

All you need to do to enter is text AWESOME to 84383. No name and address, no email address, just the one word. It really couldn't be much easier! Each text costs £1 plus your normal message rate, but if you enter twice you can make a third entry completely free!

For full details of the competition, including a l-o-n-g list of prizes and, for non-texters, a postal entry route, visit www.iwantoneofthose.com/win

The competition closes on December 10th - so keep your mobile switched on that week, because if they can't contact the winner by 1pm on the 14th, they will have to draw a new winner. You'd really kick yourself if you missed out on a prize like that!

And please, if one of you wins, can I have your Christmas Pudding bin bags? I'm sure you will have plenty other goodies left to enjoy!

Another lovely competition from Tesco Books blog

2011-10-20T15:56:00.000+01:00

Tesco books have done it again - there is a lovely new "comment to win" competition on their blog. The prize is a hamper of craft goodies and a sgined copy of Kirstie Allsopp's new book Craft, which accompanies her TV series. There are signed copies of the book for two runners up, too.

To enter this competition, pop over to the Tesco Book blog http://booksblog.tesco.com/2011/10/win-a-signed-copy-of-kirstie-allsopps-craft-and-a-hamper-of-goodies/ and leave your favourite craft tip - it can be your own original one or one you have learned from somebody else.

The competition closes on November 4th.

NOTE The competition is being run on the Tesco books blog, not here, so please don't leave your comments here - much as I'd love to read your crafty tips, they won't be entered into the compeition!

Win a wonderful treat for a little girl!

2011-10-19T16:04:00.000+01:00

Dolls' prams have a timeless appeal for little girls. And it isn't just the dolls who get wheeled around in them - teddy bears and even pets get the treatment too. I used to love pushing my cat around the garden in my doll's pram, and the cat seemed to enjoy it too. At least, he kept coming back for more!

Silver Cross have a beatuful range of dolls' prams, styled to match their well-known Heritage Collection of full sized prams. And now they are offering you the chance to win one. This beautiful pram, the Chatsworth, could be yours simply for answering a question on their Facebook page.

The pram is worth £300 - wouldn't that make a wonderful Christmas present? And the competition closes at 3pm on November 11th.

I'd like to say "Good luck" - but I'd like even more to win this for my own granddaughter!

Money Magpie

2011-10-18T17:13:00.001+01:00

Created by author and finance expert Jasmine Birtles, Moneymagpie.com is a magazine-style website offering money-saving tips and notifying readers of the very latest offers on everything from meals out to beauty products. The site receives an average of well over 3,800 visits per day.

They have invited Grape vine readers to have a look around the site:

Here at Moneymagpie.com, we love competitions. We have a page dedicated purely to comping which is updated regularly, and our free weekly newsletter – which has 35,000 subscribers and counting – always features competitions, as does our popular Bargain Alert. We also like to use our Facebook and Twitter pages to alert our readers of the latest competitions and the best comping sites and magazines.

We would be delighted if you could alert your readers to these great features of our website. The links are as follows:

How to make money from competitions article: http://www.moneymagpie.com/article/810/how-to-make-money-from-competitions

Newsletter sign-up: http://www.moneymagpie.com/moneymagpie-newsletter-signup/

Bargain Alert sign-up: http://www.moneymagpie.com/free-bargain-alerts-subscription

Twitter: http://twitter.com/moneymagpie

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/moneymagpie

Your chance to be in a TV quiz show!

2011-10-15T17:34:00.000+01:00

Splash media would like to invite compers and quizzers to apply to be on their new TV quiz show. They say "Far from your average tea-time quiz, we are looking for true intellectual heavyweights and general knowledge know-it-alls to take part in the show". Here are the details of how to apply.

Win a prize just by getting out of bed!

2011-10-13T16:43:00.001+01:00

How easy does that sound? You don't even need to brush your hair!

The Best Bed Linen in the World and award winning hairdresser Karine Jackson are looking for The Best Bed Hair in the World.

The prizes are lovely:
WINNER – Overnight stay at The Grove and a Luxury Down Surround Pillow
FIRST RUNNER-UP – Haircut with Karine Jackson (Covent Garden) and Luxury Down Surround Pillow
SECOND RUNNER-UP – Luxury Down Surround Pillow and luxury pillow cases
THIRD RUNNER-UP - Hair products from Karine Jackson and luxury pillow cases

To enter, email a photograph of your "Bed hair" to bedhair@simplerpr.com with your name, contact details and where you heard about the competition. It would be great if you could tell them you read about it on the Grape Vine blog!

You can read all about the competition, which closes on November 30th, along with the full terms and conditions, here - where there is also a link to their Facebook page where entries will be received as they come in.

And to get you thinking about your own entry, here is the picture I will be using for my own entry.

Another trip to Turkey

2011-10-10T17:10:00.002+01:00

Note: This post is my entry for the Travelizer competition for a chance to win an £800 break to a European city. Full details of the competition, and how you can enter yourself, can be found at http://www.travelizer.co.uk/ - the competition closes on November 4th

*****************************************************************************

Long term readers of this blog may recall that last year I was lucky enough to win a prize in the Sunday Times's weekly "Where Was I?" competition. The holiday prize that week was a trip to the beautiful hotel Bordubet, and you can read about the prize trip here . I finished that post with the phrase "I'll be back" and, true to my word, I returned there in September this year.

Last year I went with my friend Rosemary, but I knew my husband would love the hotel, so this year he and I went together. And we enjoyed it so much that we have already booked to go again next year!

Bordubet (the name comes from the German, not Turkish, for "bird bed" and almost every building has a beautiful bird house on the wall) is a beautiful hotel in a very isolated position on the Bozburun Peninsula of Turkey. There are no shops and bars nearby, no nightlife, no entertainment, just relaxing, beautiful gardens and a small "beach club" accessed by boat or a path winding along the hillside.

Even when the hotel is full, there are only 72 guests, and with 40 staff to look after you, the standard of service is extremely high but never obtrusive. We enjoyed lazy days and relaxing evenings, enjoying the almost-empty pool or taking the boat out to the beach club to swim in the sea. Delicious buffet style meals were served each evening among the sounds of crickets, frogs and the occasional duck-fight. The river winds through the grounds beside the restaurant, and fish swim up to the tables to beg for food.

As well as glorious lush gardens in the main part of the hotel, the kitchen garden is also open to visitors, who are free to roam around and even pick fruit and veg and take them to the kitchen to be cooked for them. Most of you know that my husband is a keen vegetable grower and loves to blog about food and gardening, so as you can imagine he was in his element! This bed of pumpkins was next to the hotel's tennis and basketball courts, so we nicknamed it the "squash court"

We came home feeling healthier and more relaxed than we had done for a very long time, and look forward to repeating the experience next year.

I must end with one more photograph - being the editor of Grape Vine, I couldn't leave the hotel without a photo of.... a grape vine!

Win a Hawaii Five-O DVD box set

2011-10-09T15:28:00.003+01:00

Hawaii Five-O was a very popular TV series in the 1970s and I have a box set of series one to give away. And an added bonus for compers - the set contains a competition for a holiday to Hawaii!

To enter, follow the instructions in the widget below, making sure you do exactly what the widget tells you to in each step. Competition closes Friday 28th October.

Pizza my way

2011-10-08T16:01:00.001+01:00

This is my entry for the Love the Garden "Taste of Tomatoes" competition. If you would like to enter yourself, check this link for full details - you could win a £200 meal at a restaurant of your choice. The competition closes on October 19th.

Pizza is a favourite in many families, but sometimes making it from scratch can seem like a bit of a faff - as well as making a yeast dough, you have to make the tomato sauce to top it with, or buy a ready-prepared sauce which leaves you feeling you might as well have bought the whole thing. But if you have some really good tomatoes, there is no need to make a sauce at all - you may be surprised to learn that fresh tomatoes make a really delicious topping without any pre-cooking.

You do need to plan a little way ahead for this - I usually prepare the tomatoes at the same time as I start making the dough. You need to choose a variety that has very few seeds, as they can make the topping watery. Ferline is a perfect one to use - I started with around 450g to make a pizza that serves 4.

Chop them up, not too finely - I cut them into chunks of about 7-8 mm - then mix them with about half a teaspoon each of salt and sugar, one teaspoon each of olive oil and balsamic vinegar, and a little black pepper. Cover and leave them to stand for a couple of hours. That's all you need to do to them!

Now prepare your chosen base. I am lucky enough to have a bread machine that I won in a Twitter competition, which has a special setting for pizza dough, so I use the recipe from the handbook. You could use your choice of home made base, or a bought base, or a savoury scone dough or even some ready-made puff pastry to ring the changes, but make sure you adjust the cooking time and temperature to suit your base.

While the tomatoes are standing, prepare any other toppings you are going to use. Today I fried some sliced chestnut mushrooms and tore a ball of mozzarella cheese into small pices, and took the strenuous step of taking the dried oregano out of the cupboard (I always think that dried tastes betterthan fresh on a pizza!). And I cut some shavings of parmesan to top the pizza with when it came out of the oven. Also grease a baking sheet, or a special pizza baking tray if you have one. Yes, yes, I won mine... I expect you are thinking "of course...." by now.

When the dough is ready, roll it out to fit your tray then brush it with oil and let it prove for a short time while you heat the oven - 200 degrees C if you are using a bread dough. Once the oven is hot, assemble your toppings on it and brush the edge of the dough with a little more oil.

Bake for about 20 minutes until risen and golden at the edges, then remove from the oven and scatter over the parmesan flakes.

Finally, serve with a green salad and a glass of wine (dare I suggest "a nice Chianti"?)

Naturally, we had a bottle of wine that I had won......

How to copy and paste.

2011-10-07T11:54:00.001+01:00

Last month, the Grape Vine update went out in a new format, and I was very surprised that among the overwhelmingly positive feedback I had, a few of you said "But it takes too much paper and ink to print out." Print it out? You really REALLY don't need to do that! Many of the competitions listed in the update are to be entered by email or online, and if you click on the links in the email you receive, they will take you straight to the website or open up an email for you, ready to send your entry. If you print it out and then try to copy the links by hand, you could make mistakes, and a website link with a typo in it simply won't work.

But I realise that sometimes you want to sit down in an armchair, away from the computer, and do the postal or text entry competitions, or have a printed list of packs and entry forms to look out for while shopping - so why not save yourself LOTS of paper and ink, and only print what you need?

To do this, all you need to do is to copy and paste the relevant parts of the update into whatever programme you like to use - maybe Word, or possibly an email to yourself - and then save it to print out when you are ready to do so.

And when I suggested that, several people then said "But how do I do that?". There wasn't space in the November Grape Vine for me to tell you how to do it, it was so packed with competitions, so here are the instructions.

First of all, open the document you want to copy FROM and the one you want to copy TO. Then use your mouse to position the cursor just before the first word you want to copy. Hold down the left button on the mouse, move to the end of the last word you want to copy, and let go. Now you will see that section of text is highlighted.

Next you have a choice of things to do:

1. Click the right mouse button. A menu will appear at the side of the highlighted text. Select "Copy" from it. Now go over to where you want to paste the text and click the right mouse button again. This time select "Paste" and your chosen text will appear in your new document, where you can save it, email it or print it out.

2. Look at the top of your screen. Whatever programme you are using, one of the headings there - usually "Edit" - will contain the word "Copy". Selecting this will copy your highlighted text. Move to your new document, and, from the menu at the top (in Word, this is the Edit menu near the left) select "Paste" and your text will appear.

3. Hit the "Ctrl" key (on the bottom left of your keyboard) at the same time as the letter C to copy the text, then move to your new document and hit the Ctrl key again but this time at the same time as the letter V. This too will paste your text.

You can combine any of the copying methods with any of the pasting methods, so you could copy by right-clicking and paste by using Ctrl-V if you like - whatever suits the programme you are using and seem to be most convenient to you.

Once you have the hang of it, you will find that it isn't just helpful for copying bits of the update - you can

copy information that you want to save from web pages
copy text from one email to another, if you want to pass it on to a friend without forwarding the whole message
copy web addresses into your address bar on those annoying times when they won't click
copy the whole of this blog post into a document to save for when you want to refer back to it!
and many, many more uses.

I know that many of you will think I am teaching my grandmother to suck eggs (actually, as far as I know my grandmother never once had the urge to suck an egg, and I wouldn't know how to do it anyway!) but for every one of you who is experienced and confident with computers, there are at least a dozen who struggle rather nervously through everything to do with them, and I'll always do my best to use plain English to help compers in that position!

Many thanks to my husband Mark for the photos; my camera just isn't man enough for the job. And if you want to see more of his brilliant photography, mostly on gardening and food themes, with lovely pictures of our granddaughter too, why not take a look at his blog?

When the automated entry services strike!

2011-09-28T17:06:00.000+01:00

If you read Compers News, you will see that Pam Crampton, Steve Middleton and I write the "Ask the Experts" column, inspired by the question-and-answer sessions we have taken part in at Derby comping days, and in May we wrote about automated entry services.

These are not new to the comping scene - they have been around for years. But in the past, they entered postal competitions on behalf of their subscribers, reducing the cost of sending the entries by printing out all the names and addresses onto paper or postcards, packing them in boxes and delivering them by courier. In the last few years, most promoters, encouraged to do so by the Institute of Promotional Marketing, have introduced a rule that says something along the lines of "All entries must be hand written and in individually stamped envelopes". Nowadays it would cost the entry service just as much as any other comper to send each entry, so they can't offer the "bargain" prices for postal entries to their subscribers, so they have turned their attention to the Internet where entries are effectively free.

I don't need to tell you what they are, how they operate or which sites they target - you can read full details about them in the campaign being spearheaded by Loquax and supported by Accolade publishing on the Loquax Blog and Superlucky Di's blog

So what I WILL do is tell you what it is like to be on the receiving end of one of these services.

Every month, I run a competition on the Grape Vine website. The prize is just a small one - a six month subscription to the magazine for compers that I produce, The Competition Grape Vine.
The aims of the competition are

to reward existing readers
to introduce the magazine to new readers
to encourage people to request a sample copy of the magazine in the hope they will like it enough to subscribe
to be a little bit of fun for all compers
to thank my comping friends for their friendship and support

Every month I get between 350 and 500 entries, many from regular entrants who try their luck every month. So I was horrified to wake up one morning and find that I had had around 17,000 entries - how was I going to check them all to see if they were correct? How would I be able to see if any contained sample requests? Entries were still flooding in faster than I could believe possible.

As I started to look at them, though, I realised that although the name of every entrant was different, they appeared to have come from only half a dozen domains. For instance, an entry from John Smith might have come from johnsmith@easybusinessmail.com or johnsmith@easybusinessmail.info or johnsmith@easymailstore.com or johnsmith@easymailstore.info and so on. And when I opened these messages, I found that none of them - apart from the very first one I'd received that night - had the extra line in the message that indicates it has been sent using the form on my website. In other words, none of those 17,000 people - only by this time it was 20,000 and still increasing - had visited the site. None had had the opportunity to look around, think "That looks interesting, I'll send for a sample and I might subscribe." None had read about the other comping sites I recommend, or maybe told their friends about the site they had just discovered. In other words, there was nothing in it for me!

Since none of the entries had used the form on the site, none of them was valid, so I spent a little time working out all the domains that had been used, blocked all mail from each of them and then set about deleting all the bogus entries. To this day, I hope that no genuine entrants sent in entries during the time the automated ones were coming in, as I might have deleted those by accident too.

So what was the effect on me? Well, it took me several hours to sort out the mess - time that, as a one woman business, I could ill afford to waste. I lost several nights' sleep, getting up several times each night to check that it hadn't happened again, and I had to spend more time working out a way of stopping it from happening again. Captcha codes can deter the mass entry services, but they can't prevent them - Captcha-cracking software is on sale for as little as $20 - so I introduced a task that depends on the entrant's name. Now an automated service would have to divide up their subscribers alphabetically if they were to target me - that takes too long so they move on to other sites.

Speaking as a comper myself, I've been comping on the Internet for many years now and spend a lot of money online - and (apart from Amazon, which is something of an addiction for me) every penny of that is spent at sites I first visited in order to enter a competition. That is what websites want, that is why they run competitions, and if the people entering the competitions never visit their sites, that is exactly what they won't get. And if the competitions don't bring them customers, they will soon save themselves time and money by stopping running them. We compers don't want that! So please, please, will you all get involved in the campaign to stop automated entry services. There are suggestion about action you can take on both the blogs I have mentioned above.

COMPERS UNITE TO SAVE OUR HOBBY!

Get Fitter with Twitter!

2011-09-25T14:19:00.000+01:00

I know that many of you have been enjoying my daily diet tips on Twitter. Some of these have been inspired by jokey emails that occasionally do the rounds, some by my heroine Miss Piggy , but most of them are all my own work. I've lost around 2 stone in the last 4 months, mostly be doing exactly the oppsite of what my tips say!

So here, for a bit of fun to cheer up any fed-up dieter, is a summary of my Twitter diet tips.

Packaged food has the calorie count on the pack. Therefore un-packaged food must have no calories

If you are right handed, anything eaten with the left hand contains no calories. And vice versa

Cows eat grass. Grass is a vegetable. So a steak topped with blue cheese is two of your five a day

Dark and white chocolate cancel each other out.

There are two things you should never eat before breakfast - lunch and dinner

Foods the same colour have the same number of calories, eg. mushrooms and Milky Bar, cottage cheese and cream.

Broken biscuits have no calories because they have all spilled out from the broken edges

Pimm’s with lots of fruit in it counts as one of your five a day and is therefore not fattening.

Anything bought and eaten in aid of charity, for instance at a cake stall or charity coffee morning, has zero calories.

Anything eaten or drunk for medicinal purposes (eg chocolate, wine, ice cream) has no calories.

Store chocolate in a high cupboard. Gravity pulls the calories out and makes them fall on the floor.

Butter isn’t fattening if you spread it on wholemeal bread.

Follow the golfing diet. Live on greens

Stay in shape. Round is a shape.

A calorie is a unit of heat. Therefore frozen foods like ice cream have no calories.

The calories on another person’s plate belong to them- so if you steal the food, they still get the calories.

Piercing food lets the calories out. So anything on a stick – cocktail sausages, kebabs, satay, Magnum - is calorie free.

Stop using that shampoo that says it gives you extra body, that’s the last thing you want!

Pasta and antipasti cancel each other out.

You are what you eat. Think twice about fruit and nuts.

The four essential food groups are ice cream, chocolate, wine and coffee.

Wine is made from grapes. Grapes are fruit. So wine counts as one of your 5 a day.

Drinking a diet drink with your food cancels out the calories in the food. Salads have the same function.

Frying food in vegetable oil makes it soak up the oil, which being made from veg counts as an extra veg

Walking to the fridge counts as exercise. Do it often. And repeat.

Holes allow calories to escape, rendering holey food like crumpets, Swiss cheese and Aero calorie free.

Compers – food you win is free, therefore it must be calorie free too.

A take away MUST take weight away. The name says it all.

Food eaten while hung over is restorative and therefore calorie free

If you eat standing up, the calories seep out through the soles of your feet.

Salad cancels out all other calories on the plate.

Eat chocolate before a meal. It blunts your appetite so you eat less.

Great Twitter hashtags to look out for on Fridays

2011-09-23T06:20:00.001+01:00

As most compers who use Twitter know, Fridays are usually a comping frenzy, with dozens of sites running Friday-only competitions. Many of us know about looking out for the hashtag #FreebieFriday but there are lots of other tags that are used regularly by sites that run Friday competitions.

Here are some to look out for - if you use the Twitter web page, you can use the "search" box to find all the tweets that include them, but many other Twitter clients such as Tweet Deck and Hoot Suite will let you have a column open for each one, so you can scroll across your screen and keep up to date with everything as it appears.

Some of these are used every week,some only occasionally, but it's worth having at least a quick look at them every week. Don't forget that many of the Friday comps only run during the day on Friday, with many of them closing in time for the promoters to draw and notify the winners before they finish work for the day, so you need to be quick off the mark.

#dinnerwinner
#firstclassfriday
#fishyfriday
#fizzyfriday
#FreebieFriday
#freeflightfriday
#fridayfeeling
#fridayfreebie
#fridayfrenzy
#fridaygiveaway
#funfriday
#giveawayfriday
#piedayfriday
#THIfriday
#faithfriday

... and at the end of the day, you'll sigh "#TGIfriday" !

Hurry! You could win a Peter Kay book.

2011-09-21T16:47:00.001+01:00

The Tesco book blog are running another competition - 3 copies of Peter Kay's new book, 'The Book That's More Than Just a Book Book', to give away, which will come with official Peter Kay tea towels. To enter the competition you just have to tell them your favourite joke - by tweet (mention @TescoBooks) or as a comment on their post (NOT this post - follow the link below!) - and they'll pick the three that made them laugh the most.

There's an extract from the book on the blog post so you can see how funny the book is.

http://booksblog.tesco.com/2011/09/weve-got-an-extract-from-peter-kays-new-book/

The competition ends Friday 23rd September.

When a prize works out perfectly!

2011-09-20T16:59:00.001+01:00

A few weeks ago, Polartec ran a competiton on their Facebook page. There was a quiz with several questions to answer, and the first prize was a weekend in Chamonix to see the Ultra Trail de Mont Blanc, a gruelling race run over the August bank holiday weekend, where thousands of runners run over a 166km course of mountain trails, with just 46 hours in which to complete the race. There were also 500 runners up prizes of sweatshirts.

When I looked at the page a few days after the competition closed, I saw lots of "Thank you for my sweatshirt" messages and felt a little disappointed, so imagine my surprise when a couple of days later I got an email to say I had won first prize!

The prize included flights to Geneva, transfers to Chamonix, a stay in a hotel and visits to several of the stopping points along the race as well as a cocktail party, meals and lots of extras.

Now. much as I love attending prize events, as many of you know my daughter Fiona is a very keen runner - she ran the Paris marathon this year. Here is a photo of her in a night race earlier this week (she is the one in green...... she is always the one in green)

And Fiona and her husband live in a village called Ferney Voltaire, just outside Geneva. I knew that she would get far more out of watching the race than I would, and also felt that she needed a treat - due to a dose of pneumonia, she'd not been able to run for several weeks. An event like this would help to get her back into the mood - and the mountain air would be good for her lungs too.

So I asked the promoter if it would be at all possible for me and my husband to take the flights to Geneva, then stay in Fiona's flat andcat-sit while she and her husband had the remainder of the prize. They couldn't have been more helpful or obliging and we were soon heading off to Geneva.

Fiona and Juan had a wonderful time in Chamonix and Fiona's enthusiasm was really fired by the race - she's even talking about doing it herself one day. It was made extra interesting for her by the fact that one of her old school friends was taking part in the race, and she met representatives from some of her favourite brands of running gear. They were extremely well looked after, stayed in a beautiful hotel, were plied with food and drink all weekend, given geneerous goody bags and were even given spending money, although as everything was provided they treated themselves to some new trail shoes with it.

Meanwhile Mark and I relaxed in Ferney, shopped on the local market and made sure there was a huge meal ready for them when they got home, starving from all that mountain air.

Two photos could win you £1,000

2011-09-08T15:46:00.000+01:00

This is one of the more unusual photography competitions! The Memorial Awareness Board are running a competition called "Dead Art? Then and Now" which is open to people of all levels of photographic skill and experience. The task is to submit two photos....... of stone memorials. Yes, photos of graves, tombs and headstones! One should be from the past and one from the current day, to illustrate the "Then and Now" theme.

You can find full details of the competition here and the closing date is 30 Sep.

A walk round a cemetery or churchyard will produce some very beautiful and moving subjects for your entry. My own favourite memorials are the simple paving stones in the Wordsworth Daffodil Garden in Grasmere, where there are stones laid in memory of my father, Edward France, and my friend Adrian Gothard.

How to give the URL of a Tweet.

2011-09-07T15:51:00.000+01:00

Usually, once you have sent a tweet on Twitter, you can forget all about it and move on to the next one. But what if you want to draw somebody's attention to that particular tweet? The most obvious reason for needing to give a link to a tweet, if you are a comper, is to prove that you have entered a competition. Then you may need to send the promoter the URL, or address, of the specific tweet you entered with.

Sometimes when you enter a competition on a blog, you are asked to tweet about it for one of your entries. What better way to prove that you have tweeted than by giving a link to your tweet? And there is a new service that handles entries for blog competitions, called Rafflecopter, which makes it so much clearer how to enter each competition than the old "list of tasks", but if you enter by tweeting, you need to be able to paste in a link to your tweet.

If you want to see Rafflecopter in action, have a look at the current competitions on Fuss Free Living - and read on to see how to paste in a link to your Twitter entry!

First send your tweet in the normal way, using whatever system you prefer. Then log on to your Twitter web page and select Profile or Your Tweets, so you can see a list of your own tweets, and identify which message you want to link to.

Look at the top message above - "Please ignore this message for now....." (If you were watching me on Twitter as I was writing this post you may have been wondering what it was all about.). Can you see where it says "12 minutes ago" underneath the message? Well, that is the time it was sent, and if you click on the time at the bottom of your message it will open a new page, something like this:

And there you are - your tweet, on a web page of its very own, which you can save as a bookmark or copy the address from the browser bar to give as a link to it. You can come back to your tweet days, months or even years later - the URL will not change.

If you would like to practise by posting a link to one of your tweets as a reply to this, feel free to give it a try!

A £5,000 prize for one lucky budding writer!

2011-09-06T17:11:00.000+01:00

Do you know a final year undergraduate? Are you, perhaps, one yourself? With the cost of studying spiralling at the moment, would £5,000 help out a bit? I'm sure it would - and that is the prize on offer in the new competition from The London Library and The Times.

First prize is £5,000 cash, your work published and subscriptions to The Times and London Library
Three runners up prizes are £1,000 cash and the same subscriptions.
Plus winners and runners up get an internship at The Times - that could be the start of a great career.
The brief is to write no more than 800 words on "The future of Britain lies with the right-hand side of the brain".
You can find more details here - http://www.londonlibrarystudentprize.com

Full details are on the website - entries need to be in by January 12th

Lots of lovely prizes to be won with Renault

2011-09-05T14:21:00.001+01:00

I drive a Renault Clio. My last car was a Clio too - in all, I've been driving Clios for around 14 years and unless I win a car before I'm next due to change, my next car will probably be a Clio too. It's unusual to find a small car that is comfortable for a tall person to drive, it has an amazingly large luggage capacity for its size - handy for lugging home all the bags of competition packs, in-store magazines and entry forms I collect - and it is very economical on fuel - again, very useful when I have to make a lot of trips to look for competitions.

If you take a test drive of a Clio at a participating Renault Dealer before 19 Sep and pick up a scratchcard, you can check online at www.rewardsfromrenault.co.uk to see if you have won one of 2,000 prizes - 88 pairs of standard concert tickets and 8 pairs of best seats in the house concert tickets to the Rihanna Loud Tour 2011 at one of 10 UK venues. 1,704 items of Rihanna merchandise, 200 'Loud' CD's. If you win tickets and live more than 80 miles from the nearest venue, you will also get £100 towards travel.

Everyone who takes part in the instant win will also be entered into a draw to win one of four pairs of "Meet and Greet" tickets to see Rihanna in concert or 12 pairs of tickets to her concert in Dublin with transport and a night's accommodation. Any unclaimed instant prizes will also be included in this draw.

If you don't want to take a test drive, you can enter a separate draw at www.vavavoom.co.uk where there are 10 pairs of tickets to Rihanna's concert at the O2 on 22Dec, including £100 towards transport if you live more than 80 miles away. This draw closes 30 Nov.

Win a cooking class - in Hong Kong

2011-09-02T16:57:00.001+01:00

I really don't know why I'm sharing this with you as I would love so much to win it myself! As many of you already know, I lived in Hong Kong for around 7 years in the 1970s and 1980s. That is where I developed my love of not only Chinese food, but also Indonesian, Malaysian and Nepalese. I arrived there never having even seen a wok in real life, and by the time I left, was teaching evening classes in Chinese cookery to forces wives. I would love to go back and see how much Hong Kong has changed since we left 25 years ago, and to brush up on my skills and maybe learn some new ones.

So this combines my loves of travel, cooking and competitions - all we need to do is work in some papercrafting and my life is complete. How about some Chinese themed cards that I made?

Right, now all my boxes are ticked, what about the competition?

Cathay Pacific is running the competition through an app on their Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/cathaypacificUK?sk=app_207440762645809

Here is what they say about it:

Offering a real taste of the Orient, visitors to Cathay Pacific’s competition app on its Facebook page will be in with a chance of flying off with one economy return flight from the UK to a different destination in Asia each week over an eight week period, starting from 1 September. Exotic destinations include Vietnam, Sichuan, Hong Kong, Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, Taiwan and Korea.

All entrants from the previous eight weeks will then be automatically entered into a grand prize draw to win the star prize - a return pair of business flights to Hong Kong, with a three-night stay and a cooking master class for two at The Peninsula Hotel.

Accessible via Cathay Pacific’s UK Facebook page, people visiting the app will not only be able to join Cathay Pacific on board by winning flights to Hong Kong and beyond, but they will also be able to download and try featured recipes, learn new cooking skills and savour the delights that the Orient has to share.

To enter, visitors simply have to submit a culinary tip in response to a question posted on the app each week for a chance to win a flight to a different destination. Visitors can then view and share other people’s cooking tips which are also uploaded.

Cathay Pacific operates four daily flights from London Heathrow to HongDragonair.

The first week's competition is now open, with a prize of flights to Hanoi. I've recently enjoyed watching Luke Nguyen's programme on the Good Food Channel about Vietnamese food, and would love to sample it "in situ" so I'll definitely be entering this week! The other destinations are

week 1 (1/Sep) Hanoi, Vietnam

week 2 (8/Sep): Chengdu, China

week 3 (15/Sep): Hong Kong

week 4 (22/Sep): Tokyo, Japan

week 5 (29/Sep): Cebu, The Philippines

week 6 (6/Oct): Phuket, Thailand

week 7 (13/Oct): Taipei, Taiwan

week 8 (20/Oct): Seoul, Korea

week 9 (27/Oct): Grand Prize Draw

This banquet was cooked for us by my Chinese amah and her friend to welcome my parents when they visited Hong Kong - you too could learn to cook like this!

Whiskas Winners

2011-09-01T12:14:00.000+01:00

Thank you to all of you who entered the Whiskas competition. There were one or two of you who tweeted but didn't leave a comment with your Twitter name - I'm afraid you didn't go into the hat as the instructions said that you had to leave a comment as well as tweeting as tweets alone can so easily fail to show up in Twitter search!

The winners were drawn with the help of http://www.randomnumbergenerator.com/ and are:

First two prizes
@annaojbee
@cleggy23

Thirteeen runners up
@lackro
@emilyh13
@7hippopotamus
@tazamuffin
@Busylizzie123
@spritneybeers
@IreneH2
@WISHGIRL123
@tinselgirl
@Nicky781
@capodemonte
@halkerstone
@judithsbooks

You should all have received a Direct Message on Twitter asking for your address. Well done everyone and thank you for entering.

Get your Vampire name - and win a t-shirt

2011-08-31T14:50:00.001+01:00

Tesco Books have a great giveaway at the moment which they think will be a real hit with parents with children who are Horrid Henry fans.

To celebrate the publication of Horrid Henry's latest adventure, Horrid Henry and the Zombie Vampire, they have a special competition: you can win 1 of 10 LIMITED EDITION Horrid Henry and the Zombie Vampire kids t-shirts (aged 7-8 years). Simply answer the below question:

What would your vampire name be and why?

Enter at:

http://booksblog.tesco.com/category/tesco-team/

While you are there, why not try the Vampire Name generator and see what it suggests for you? It might help you with your entry. I had a go with it and this is the result:

The Great Archives determine that I have gone by the identity: Giselle Shakespeare
Known in some parts of the world as: Cerridwen of The Steely Moon
The Great Archives Record: A child of the Moon Goddess - Cold, determined, but of the light in the night.
Get your own vampire names from The Vampire Name Generator!

Do Captcha Codes Make You Cross?

2011-08-22T16:55:00.001+01:00

Nowadays, in an attempt to prevent spammers, many websites use a verification system known as Captcha. In fact if you comment on this blog, you may be asked to type two distorted words into a box. This system is designed to prevent forms being filled in automatically, by computer, and so is very popular with competition promoters who want to try to prevent thousands of entries coming in from people who have never even visited the site, but have paid an entering service to enter on their behalf.

Unfortunately, computer programmes to get around the Captcha syatem are now available, so they no longer provide as much protection as they used to for the site owners. but for the time being they are still the most popular anti-spam measure a comper will encounter.

However they are sometimes almost impossible to read, and can be very frustrating for compers. So here are a few tips that might save you some precious comping time.

First of all, you probably know that if you can't read the words, you can ask for new ones by clicking on the circular arrows at the side of the code box. But do you know that you can also ask to have the visual words replaced by audio ones, by clicking on the loudspeaker symbol? But beware, the sounds are distorted and if the site is one that plays background music, it can become such a jumble that you can't tell what is being said.

Moving on to the written words, there are often a mixture of lower case and capital letters. But Captcha (and I'm only talking specifically about the genuine Captcha codes that show the brand name at the side) are not case sensitive, so you don't need to worry about switching between upper and lower cases, just type the whole thing in whatever case you were using at the time.

Next, Captcha doesn't read symbols or punctuation, so words that include apostrophes, colons, brackets or weird mathematical symbols can just have them left out - simply type just the letters and ignore the rest.

But here is the BIG SECRET - Captcha actually only reads ONE of the two words. But it is a specific one, and here are some tips for working out which one it is looking for. You DO need to type something for the other word, but it can be absolutely anything. The quickest thing to do is just type one letter. How do you identify which word to type? Here are the clues to look for:

The word will only use keyboard letters- no symbols, no punctuation and no foreign characters. If you find a word written all in Greek or a mathematical equation, just type any old letter.
The word will be the right way up - so you no longer need to stand on your head to type one of the words: if a word is upside down, ignore it and type whatever you fancy in its place.
The word will be in Captcha's normal font. If you are a regular comper, you will already be able to recognise when a very different font or typeface is being used. Italics, fancy script and anything else out-of-the-ordinary is a clue that this is the word to ignore.
The word will have a special clue showing which it is. Captcha does the same trick to every "correct" word, but it changes the trick every now and then. They may have a slight shadow on the letters, or a negative background, or have some other little trick played on them. At the time I am writing this, all the correct words have a wavy line running through them.
UPDATE 18 Sep 2011. The special way of identifying the word you need to give has changed - now it is the word in which some letters appear in outline form. I've been experimenting and have found that if you get the "correct" word right, it is the ONLY word you need to give - you don't even need to type a single letter of the other one.

Getting used to spotting the correct word and just typing one letter for the other one can save you a lot of time - give it a go and let me know how you get on!

CLOSED Win Whiskas treats for your cat and t-shirts for you!

2011-08-18T08:57:00.005+01:00

I'm sure every cat owner has sometimes wished they were a cat! Maybe not many go to the lengths of my mother, who once wrote to Jim'll Fix It asking him to fix it for her to have a long, furry tail (he never replied). But wouldn't it be lovely to laze around all day, be pampered on demand and have meals served up whenever you want them? The nearest I ever get to that is a day at a spa.

I used to have two lovely cats - sadly they were old men and are no longer around.

As you can see, they always got the best seats and attention on demand!

The people at Whiskas have been thinking about what would happen if people were to live their lives more like cats, and have come up with some tips, ideas and even videos to help us. You can read their manifesto on Facebook and see some videos on YouTube

Here is what Claire, from Life, Ninja Killer Cat and Everything Else has to say:

Even if you don't like cats you can't have failed to see relaxed they are, though some would say lazy. Cats merely save their energy for the important things in life be it sleeping or eating. It is something perhaps we could all do, live a little more like cats. This might even help bring balance to our lives.

This is part of a mans adventures of living like a cat for a week

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uelqZ-tH3q8 target="_blank"

This is a quote from a lady I know on twitter

"Trying not to nod off as the cat is sleeping on my desk & giving me ideas about a nicer way to spend the pm. #wishiwasacat"

I asked her if I could use her quote and she said yes!

"Of course!Happy to oblige-especially as said cat has succeeded in making me incredibly lethargic". #thepowerofcats

Thanks to Claire and her cat Rollie, and the Whiskas team, I have LOTS of prizes to give away. There are two first prizes of a t-shirt and a selection of cat treats, and 13 runners up prizes of a t-shirt.

To enter, follow me on Twitter then tweet

I want to win cat goodies from @janesgrapevine and @needaphone at http://bit.ly/qN4ZWt

Then come back here to tell me you have entered, leaving your Twitter name in the comment.

The competition will close at midnight on August 31st. UK entries only, one entry per person (although you are welcome to tweet about the comp as often as you like!) and no bulk, automated or third party entries. Winners will be contacted by direct message on Twitter - so if you don't follow me you won't know you've won as I won't be able to DM you!

THIS COMPETITION IS NOW CLOSED ANDWINNERS HAVE BEEN CONTACTED - SEE THE 01 sEP POST FOR A LIST OF WINNERS

Two lovely new competitions for you to enter

2011-08-16T15:25:00.000+01:00

Tesco Books have invited us all to enter their latest competition - it sounds like an absolutely lovely prize and my mind is working overtime on ideas for who I'd like to invite, although of course I'd really like to be allowed to invite all my lovely readers and followers! Here are the details:

To celebrate the release of Angel Adoree’s first book, The Vintage Tea Party - which Domestic Sluttery suggests is ‘the most beautiful book ever’ – we’re hosting a competition to win one of her immersive ‘Vintage Tea Party’ experiences for you and 12 of your friends.

To enter the competition all you need to do is tell us which three guests you would invite to your fantasy tea party. Your guests can be real, fictional or no longer with us – whoever takes your fancy!

You can post your answer on Twitter using the hashtag #tescoteaparty or on our blog in the comments section here: http://booksblog.tesco.com/2011/08/win-a-vintage-tea-party-for-you-and-your-friends/

The winner will be chosen at random on Friday the 26^th of August, announced on the Tesco Books blog and Twitter account.

And Life, Ninja Killer Cat and Everything Else is giving you a chance to win a beautiful Hastings Crystal personalised pet bowl for your dog or cat. Do pop over to this page for a look - even if you don't have a pet of your own to win the prize for, it is well worth dropping in to see the gorgeous cat Rollie, who helps to write the blog, posing in his Chelsea football shirt.

A Whale of a trip.

2011-08-15T14:17:00.000+01:00

I am often asked "What is the best prize you have ever won?" Well, I've been a successful comper for over 25 years and have won some wonderful prizes, so it's impossible to name a single favourite, but one of the most memorable came about 15 years ago, from a caption competition on Tetra fish food - a whale watching holiday to the San Ignacio Lagoon in Mexico. The prize was for two people but we paid to take one of our teenage daughters along too.

The weather was dreadful when we reached San Diego to board our boat, with the wind so strong the palm trees along the waterfront road were bent almost double. El Nino was battering the coast, and when we stopped for a quick meal before boarding the ship, the café owner reassured us by announcing "You must be mad - you'll all die!"

Our confidence wasn't boosted at all when we saw the boat that was going to be our home for the next week - to us it looked more like something that would take day trips around the bay.

But we went on to have a wonderful and very memorable trip. Here is a little report I wrote about it at the time:

Setting out from San Diego on a small boat in a storm wasn’t my idea of fun, but unlike most other passengers at least I didn’t have to resort to carrying a large plastic bag around……

After 24 hours we reached the calm of a group of islands and were glad to go ashore to visit colonies of elephant seals (although the smell had a few people reaching for the bags again) then sailed on to the main focus of the trip – the San Ignacio Lagoon in Mexico where we spent several days touring the lagoon in small boats, watching the grey whales.

The whales were as curious as we were, coming right up to the boats and up out of the water to look at us. Getting so close to these gentle giants was a sensational experience, especially when a baby whale was brought by its mother to see us. The tiny looking baby was probably bigger than my car, which really put things into perspective for me.

But it wasn’t just about the whales – it was about the wonderful variety of wildlife at sea; dolphins, sunfish, pelicans, albatross and playful seal pups. It was about the “green flash” at dawn and spending a week in cramped conditions with strangers who soon became friends. It was about storms and sunshine and being as different from my routine everyday life as it could possibly be.

And one day it was about boiled broccoli for breakfast.

Home from my holiday

2011-08-14T10:55:00.000+01:00

If you've found it a bit quiet on the blog recently, it's because I have been away on holiday. My husband and I (ooh, how regal that sounds!) rented a very beautiful little cottage in Pembridge, Herefordshire, for a week. I won't say it was peaceful, as it was at the side of a very busy road with lorries thundering past all day and most of the night, but it was historic, charming and comfortable and set in a very beautiful area.

Of course, despite being on holiday, I was hard at work all week.

Well, actually I DID find a few new competitions, and my team of Elves worked hard to find more, so now I have to get on with producing yet another bumper update which should reach subscribers later this week.

If you'd like to know more about our holiday, my husband has written about it, with some of his fantastic photos, on his blog.

Justin Bieber DVDs winner!

2011-08-01T08:15:00.000+01:00

Thank you to all who entered the competition for the Justin Bieber DVDs. There were 75 entries, of which 6 gave the wrong answer. The winner was drawn from the 69 correct entries and is

GILLIAN WALKER

Look out for an email from me, Gillian.

If you are looking for more competitions to enter, why not pop over to the Grape Vine website where the August competition to win a 6 month subscription to Grape Vine has just started?

Keeping your Twitter account safe from hackers

2011-07-31T16:49:00.000+01:00

Have you ever logged in to Twitter and seen that a friend has been sending strange tweets and direct messages? Or worse still, have you logged in and found that YOU have been sending them and upset some of your friends - even though you weren't online at the time? Or maybe you suddenly find that you have followed people you have never heard of, or unfollowed some of your best friends?

One thing you can be sure of: as soon as somebody opens an account of any kind - an email account, a Twitter account or a Facebook account - somebody else will try to get control of it. Sometimes for criminal purposes such as identity theft, sometimes to try to get free advertising for their dodgy services, and sometimes to cause as much hassle as possible to as many people as possible. But as often as not, they do it simply to prove that they CAN. And while we may wish the perpetrators would go and get themselves a life, we still need to deal with the trouble they have caused.

So how can you prevent it happening?

The number one rule is not to click on any links unless you are 100% certain where they are going to take you. Now if you are a comper, you will be used to me saying "Click on the link in the tweet to make sure you have read the full instructions". No, I am not contradicting myself! If a tweet is clearly a competition tweet, then the link in it is safe. But if you get a tweet that has nothing BUT a link in it, even if it appears to be from your very best friend, STOP!!!! Don't click until you have checked with them whether they really sent it and what it is about.

Sometimes there won't be just a link, there will be a message saying "Is this you in the photo?" or "You have been mentioned in this blog" or "See who has been viewing your profile". All these are designed to lure you to sites where you will grant the application authority to access your Twitter profile before you can see the photo/blog/list in question. Then, of course, the photo, blog or list will be fake but the hacker has access to your account - authorised by you! - and can start sending messages from it.

So the next rule is: don't authorise any application unless you are 100% certain that it is a genuine application that will be useful to you. There are some wonderful applications out there that can really help you to manage your Twitter account, but make sure any you use has been recommended to you by a reputable source. And GENUINELY recommended by them - not tweeted from their account by a hacker pretending to be them.

What should you do if you are hacked?

First of all, let all your followers know and warn them not to click in the links in any unusual messages you may have sent them.

Next change your password. To do this, go to your twitter home page and click on the arrow beside your name at the very top right, then choose "Settings" then "Password". The harder your password is for you to remember, the harder it is for a hacker to guess! So make it more complicated than your old one by mixing letters and numbers and not using a name or a recognisable word. Don't forget that if you access Twitter through another application, such as Tweet Deck, or on your phone, you will need to change the password there as well.

Now revoke authority to all applications but the ones you know you use regularly. To do this, still on the Settings page, choose the "Applications" tab and click on "Revoke access" next to all the ones you want to remove or don't instantly recognise. It's OK to be quite ruthless about this as you can easily re-allow ones you revoke accidentally - they will simply ask you for authority next time you try to use them.

Finally, make your computer forget! Log out of Twitter (and remember your new password for when you log back in) then clear your cookies and history (in Internet Explorer you do this from the Internet Options menu under "Tools" or the little cog wheel) and, if you have time, restart your computer so that when it starts up again, it will have forgotten that your account was ever compromised!

I hope you never have to do any of this - but remember this page just in case you should ever need it.

CLOSED Win a Justin Bieber double DVD

2011-07-28T14:09:00.002+01:00

At the moment, there is a limited edition double DVD of Justin Bieber's "Never Say Never" available only at Asda. One DVD is the same one available singly elsewhere, the other is the Extended Director's Edition with 40 minutes of extra footage and lots of other extras.

Demand for this DVD set has been so high that Paramount has had difficulty supplying everyone and some orders placed online at Asda have been delayed. So you may well have a sulky teenage girl in the house, claiming that her summer holiday has been completely ruined by the lack of DVD. Or you may know a teenage girl (or boy!) who would love it. Or you may secretly hanker after a copy for yourself...... I promise not to tell if you do!

I have a pair of DVDs to give away. And better news still for any Belibers or parents of Belibers, the main DVD contains a leaflet that gives details of a competition to win one of two trips to the USA to meet the man (or should that be boy?) himself!

THIS COMPETITION IS NOW CLOSED.

To enter this competition, all you need to do is to fill in this simple form - if you need any help with the answer, try looking here . The form will only allow me to collect 100 responses so HURRY as the competition will close once all 100 have been received. I will announce here and on Twitter when the limit has been reached. If I have not reached 100 entries by midnight on Sunday 31 July I will close the competition anyway in order to be able to post the prize out as soon as possible.

One entry per person - I think in any case the form will only let you visit once from one computer so you don't really get any choice in the matter! As you can tell, I've not used this service to run a competition before so it's a learning experience for me as well as a chance of a prize for you.

Winning Dishes

2011-07-26T15:06:00.001+01:00

This week, Superlucky Di has given us a lovely list of recipe competitions to enter. If you've been reading my blog for a while, you'll probably already know how much I love food and recipe competitions and last summer I gave you some tips for entering recipe competitions (ignore the competitions at the end of the article, they closed ages ago now but the tips are still valid) that you may find useful while working your way through Di's blog.

I thought you might be able to draw some inspiration from some photos of my own winning recipes.

Roast rack of lamb with tomato and raisin relish, souffléed potato patties and a warm green bean vinaigrette. This won me a day at the Waitrose cookery school - and one of the other winners was Superlucky Di herself. The competition was run by Casillero Del Diablo wines.

Spiced lamb with Pastawheat. This won me a wonderful cookery course in Italy, from Merchant Gourmet foods - and my recipe was published as a recipe card and sent out to all their mailing list.

"Jamie salad"- we call it this because it was inspired by a peach, mozzarella, rocket and Parma ham salad in one of Jamie Oliver's books, but I have taken his idea and run so far with it that this version is all my own. It won me a beautiful salad bowl from the weekly competition (still going on) on the Lurpak Facebook page. This is a good competition to enter if you don't feel confident about writing your recipe out, as you just have to provide a photograph of the dish.

Finally, another competition that only asks for a photograph, the "Star Salads" competition from Apetina . I have entered this twice - and won a hamper of salad making equipment both times. There are seven prizes a week to be won and I don't think they are getting a huge number of entries so your chances are good! The competition carries on until September 1st. Here are my winning photos - the first is a salad of Apetina, beetroot, broad beans and mint and the second a variation of a classic Greek salad, but with watermelon added to give it a sweet, tangy kick.

The lovely photos I used today were taken by my husband, a very talented gardener who grows much of the veg and salad that we eat. If you would like to see more of his photos, including lots of stunning ones of the garden, have a look at his blog, Mark's Veg Plot where you will often see posts about what we have been cooking and eating.

Now I must dash...... somebody tweeted a link to a blog post about Pesto Bread this morning and it sounded so scrummy that I had to make some right away. And from the smell of things, it's just about ready to come out of the oven!

How to choose fresh fish

2011-07-25T15:38:00.000+01:00

Now this may seem like a rather odd topic for a blog that is primarily about competitions, so let me explain why I'm writing it.

Last year, a good friend, Sharon Buchalter, was lucky enough to win a fish cookery day for two, at a restaurant not far from my home. Unfortunately she had to drop out at short notice, so she very generously arranged to have the day transferred to me and my daughter.

We had a fascinating day, cooking and eating numerous dishes, all accompanied by indecent amounts of excellent wine. The most useful information of all though, was gleaned not from the cooking and eating, but from the visit to the in-house fishmonger's shop where we were given some invaluable tips on choosing and buying fresh fish. Tips that apply just as much if you are shopping at a supermarket fish stall as if you are fortunate enough to be able to shop at an old-fashioned fishmonger.

I think we’ve all heard that when shopping for fish, you should look for bright eyes. The eyes should be shiny and slightly raised from the face. If they are sunken inwards and/or slightly opaque, the fish is past its peak of freshness.

The gills should be bright red when you look inside them, not a grey brown colour. Fresh blood is OK- slime isn’t.

A whole fish is also pretty stiff when it is very fresh. Something the size of a mackerel can be held up straight like a truncheon and not flop over (no sniggering at the back).

Flat fish should have a thin covering of rather horrible feeling slime – the nastier they feel, the fresher they are.

Other fish should feel quite scaly when you run your finger up the body the wrong way. As the fish ages, the outer scales fall off and the skin becomes smoother.

It should smell of fresh sea air, not “fishy”

If it is filleted so that you can see the flesh, the whiter it is, the fresher it is. The flakes of fish should be densely packed and the meat feel firm.

Obviously most fishmongers and especially supermarket fish stalls don’t want you to handle or sniff their fish, so look out for these ways of disguising less-than-fresh fish (Note – if it’s on sale it MUST be fit to eat, by law, but it’s not going to keep when you get it home).

It’s quite easy for them to display their fish in such a way that you can’t see whether it is stiff or not, but there are some other things to look out for.

The first thing they do is cut the head off, so you can’t see the gills or eyes. In a display of really fresh fish, the only fish without a head will be the monkfish, which most fishmongers feel is so ugly it puts people off buying.

Next they “clean” the fish, washing off the slime from flat fish or scraping off scales from other fish. This of course saves them time as they can do it when the shop/stall is quiet rather than doing it for each customer who comes along, but it’s also a very handy way of disguising fish that has already started to lose its slime or scales.

The fish that has been cut up and put in packs is likely to be the oldest of the lot, still edible but carefully arranged so that if you are looking out for any of the pointers above you can’t see them.

I hope you find these tips useful - they have certainly helped me in my shopping.

Photo courtesy of

Image: pixbox77 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

How many times should I enter?

2011-07-24T16:44:00.000+01:00

How often do YOU enter each competition? Do you concentrate all your efforts on just a few competitions at a time, perhaps sending in entries on behalf of all your family and friends, or do you frantically try to enter every competition you see, eventually having to admit that there just isn't enough time to make just ONE entry to all the ones you want to enter? I must admit, I belong to the latter camp. I would love to have the time to work through every competition out there, putting an entry in to every single one whose prize I fancy, but sadly I haven't yet found any competitions where the prize is 24 hours of uninterrupted free time, so I just can't keep up.

I imagine the price of postage has put most of us off doing multiple entries to postal competitions these days - the rules almost always say "One entry per envelope" so you can't save on stamps that way. But I have noticed recently that quite a few entry forms are giving Freepost addresses, so as long as the rules permit, it wouldn't cost too much to send in more than one entry. Some people go to extreme lengths though - a representative from a handling house once told me that in a competition they ran a few years ago, one student was so determined to win the car prize that he got all his friends to spend many hours writing out thousands and thousands of entries - so many that in the end he had to hire a van and deliver them all to the handling house in person. And did he win? Well, yes, he did, but it made them think hard about how many entries it is reasonable to accept from one person and have introduced a rule that says "entries must be in individual, stamped envelopes" so hand delivered entries are no longer acceptable. (And do remember that when it says "stamped" it means stamped and not franked, so no trying to slip your entries through the office franking system - they won't be accepted).

The same person told me that when a rule says "one entry per person" and they get multiple entries from people living at the same address, they start to get suspicious if there are more than half a dozen entries from the same address and are likely to check it out. If it turns out to be an ordinary house and not something like a hall of residence or nurse's home they will consider disqualifying the entries - so if you tend to enter on behalf of your cats, hamsters and goldfish you may be reducing your chances rather than improving them.

How many mobile phones do you have? I know of compers with batteries of them lined up on the desk, so they can enter every text competition dozens of times. As with postal competitions, I would be put off by the time and cost involved. I did have two phones for text comps for a while, but I was very half-hearted about using my second phone and only ever won one small prize with it. I lost it about 6 months ago - I think it's down the back of the book case somewhere - and I can't honestly say I have missed it. I'm just not organised enough to keep up multiple personalities, and in any case my one trusty phone has won me some wonderful prizes including two fantastic holidays so I think I will stay loyal to it.

How about online competitions? Many websites only allow you one entry - and they can very easily tell if you have entered on behalf of other people by tracking your IP address. But the good news is that almost all of them will still allow your first entry, disqualifying further ones made from your computer, so you still get one entry into the draw even if you enter for several people (or enter for yourself more than once, whether by accident or design). What about competitions that allow you to enter more than once? Personally I still only enter once, as there are more competitions out there than I could possible cope with, but I do make exceptions. The competitions linked to ITV programmes, for instance, have such lovely prizes that they spur me on to make a bit more effort. Each one allows either 3 or 5 entries, and it very helpfully tells you if you try to enter too often, so I'm happy to spend a few minutes pressing the "back" key and entering again. And if there is a new prize to be won every day, I will enter every day. Otherwise I just move on to the next competition.

On Twitter, the original tweet for a competition may well include a link to the terms and conditions. It's ALWAYS a good idea to follow the link and read it. I often see people tweeting a competition several times, maybe even every day, when the rules have said "one entry per person". Twitter has arranged things so that you can't retweet the same message multiple times, and finding ways around this such as altering the message slightly can mean that your entry isn't actually seen by the promoter. And also retweeting the same thing over and over again can result in you being sent to "Twitter Jail", or even having your account suspended, as can having multiple accounts and tweeting the same things from them.

But for me, the ideal number of entries to make is the number I enjoy doing! That might be one-a-day, it might be none at all, it all depends on the competition, the prize, and, if it is a website competition, the speed and user friendliness of the site.

So how many entries do YOU like to make for competitions of various kinds? And how successful is your strategy? Come on, own up! And feel free to do it anonymously if you think some people might find your statistics excessive - I promise not to criticise.

It's almost Friday again.....

2011-07-21T14:19:00.000+01:00

And, as I've mentioned before. Friday is a FANTASTIC day to be a comper! My husband has a day off tomorrow and thinks we are going shopping..... I'm going to have to put him right about that. But even if I'm not around, do feel free to watch, or follow, my current Friday list on Twitter - the people on my list run competitions most Fridays, and if you watch my list rather then watching me, you don't need to rely on me being around to tweet competitions.

But now things have started to hot up on Facebook on Fridays too. Soon compers are going to have to declare a four day week,so we can devote our Fridays entirely to comping! This Friday, July 22nd, a one off competition is going to be run by Voucher Hub - but you will have to be quick off the mark, as the winners will be the first 10 correct entries, who will each win £15 worth of iTunes vouchers.

The competition will take the form of a "pin the tail on the pig" game, with entrants needing to choose a grid reference from a picture. Voucher Hub will be giving clues once the game is under way.

Good luck - and I hope by tomorrow evening that some of you will be "squealing" with delight!

From my Comping Library: 4. The Books

2011-07-18T07:35:00.000+01:00

When I feel as if I've lost my comping "mojo", when the wins aren't appearing and my enthusiasm for comping starts to flag, there's nothing gives me more of a boost than reading a book about comping. It can fire me with enthusiam and ideas, and give me a real lift, especially when reading about other compers' wins and experiences.

Books about comping are few and far between. I believe a couple of new ones have been published recently, so I will look out for them and tell you more about them when I have read them, but all the ones in my collection are a good few years old now.

At the times these books were written, the authors were probably among the best known names in comping. Robert Kendal, who was a regular columnist in Competitors Journal, wrote "Prize Winning Ways" in 1988, and although in his day the only way to enter a competition was by post, a great deal of his advice still applies to all our more modern ways of comping.

Kathy Kantypowicz is another name which will be familiar to those who have been comping for some years. She produced a comping magazine of her own and contributed to several others, and the lessons learned from her experiences form the basis for her book "Winning Consumer Competitions" published in 1996. It includes an interesting look at comping from a promoter's point of view, and brings us a little closer to modern times with a look at how to get on to TV game shows.

Also published in 1996. "How to Win Any Consumer Competition" was written by Martin Dove, who still writes for Simply Prizes magazine. It is a more light hearted book than the first two, with lots of lively anecdotes and potted biographies of successful compers.

I don't turn to "How to win Consumer Competitions" by Graham Stevenson, published in 1992, as often as the other books in my collection because most of the information in it hasn't stood the test of time as well as the rest, although there is some very useful advice on how to get letters published in magazines.

"How to Win Any Slogan Competition" , written in 1994 by Angelina Kaye, is simply a huge and useful collection of previous winning tiebreakers, grouped according to theme. Although tiebreaker competitions are quite rare nowadays, a collection like this gives you great ideas for puns, rhymes and word-play when you DO find one to enter.

And even more tiebreaker inspiration comes from Lynne Suzanne and Dee Tracy in "Pun-ch Lines" (1999) which gives you the basic building blocks you need to create your own witty, pun-filled tiebreakers on almost any subject. Many older compers will be familiar with the postal comping club that Lynne ran for many years, and the numerous and very useful booklets and tiebreaker collectionsshe published.

My final look this time is at a real piece of comping history - "American Slogans 1952-53" by William Sunners.

William Sunners was a prominent comper in the USA in the 1950s and wrote many books for compers. This one - aimed at advertising students and copywriters rather than compers - is the only work of his that I have been lucky enough to get hold of. It is simply a list of thousands and thousands of advertising slogans of all kinds from all over the USA. While probably not a lot of use to a modern comper, it is still a fascinating book to leaf through. Who these days, for instance, would advertise a hardware store as "The house of a million nuts"?

While all these books are long out of print, you can occasionally find some of them, and similar titles, listed on eBay or on Amazon Marketplace. And if you know the names and/or authoers of the recently published books, please let me know - I would love to bring my collection up to date!

What is Grape Vine?

2011-07-15T15:09:00.000+01:00

The Grape Vine blog was originally set up to help me to keep in touch with subscribers in between issues, but it has developed into a much bigger comping resource than I ever imagined it would, and is regularly read by hundreds of you who may not even know what Grape Vine is – so here is a little introduction to the magazine I produce as my “day job”.

Set up by John Lock, about 18 years ago, and passed on to me when he retired 6 years ago, The Competition Grape Vine is a monthly magazine for compers of all ages and amounts of experience. Originally devoted to postal comping only, it now covers competitions of all kinds, online, postal, text, phone – the only provisos being that information about them was originally sourced offline in some way, and that the competitions in them do not come from paid-for news-stand magazines, although where a store charges for its own in-store magazine I do include it. There are some wonderful websites and forums that cover online only competitions, and some excellent magazines that list hundreds of competitions from news-stand magazines, but Grape Vine works hard to bring readers something a bit different.

In every issue, you will read a list of big wins that readers have had in the previous month – and if that wasn’t testament enough to our success, lists of winners of less-big prizes are frequently made up almost exclusively of Grape Vine readers. And no wonder – I go out of my way to source hard-to-find and potentially low entry competitions, and with only a few hundred subscribers, many of the competitions I feature give you an outstanding chance of winning.

Why not give Grape Vine a try? Subscribers get a printed monthly magazine, an email update part way through the month crammed with last-minute competitions, the chance to swap entry forms, advice on answers and entry codes (when it is possible to enter without proof of purchase), and even a winners-list checking service for if you see a tiebreaker that you think is yours but haven’t received a prize. And if you have any queries about a prize that goes missing or isn’t as described, I keep the details of every competition until a year after the closing date so I can help you to refer back to what you SHOULD have won. Any sneaky rules that might catch you out are highlighted, and I can help subscribers out with direct links to online competitions that appear to have vanished into thin air. In fact Grape Vine is more than just a magazine – it is a complete comping service and many readers tell me it is more like belonging to a club than simply reading a magazine.

A 3 month subscription costs just £13.50, 6 months £25 and 12 months £45. Just one small win can cover the cost! And if you have never had a copy before, you can request a free sample simply by emailing your name and address to janesgrapevine@yahoo.co.uk - go on! You’ve got nothing to lose – and possibly a lot to win!!!

Win a Super Travel Kit for kids!

2011-07-14T15:27:00.000+01:00

There is a lovely competition for bloggers being hosted by Red Ted Art at the moment. By getting creative with the family, you could win

* A child’s digital camera (VTech Kidizoom Plus Multimedia Digital Camera)

* A fab trunki suitcase (Tiger)

* Child’s headphones (Kidz Gear Wired Headphones For Kids)

* Quality doodle book

* Crayola shark fin case

* Sunscreen

* A pair of goggles

All the details of how to enter are on Red Ted Art's page - you need to get crafty with the family, using one of the story themes on the page, and then blog about your efforts, giving a link to your blog on the competition page. Make sure you read the instructions and rules carefully so that you include all the necessary information in your blog. The competition closes on July 28th.

Now as I'm not likely to get any crafting time with my granddaughter before then, I'm not personally entering the competition. But in the spirit of sharing our hand made crafts, I thought I'd share with you some of the cards I've made in the last few weeks, And yes, some of them ARE Christmas cards..... when your crafting time is as unpredictable as mine, it's always wise to get well ahead of the game!

And since I've included some of my hand made cards, I'm also joining in with Hand Made Thursday at White Lily Green for the first time ever - I hope I have done it right!

Win £750 worth of design and print for your business

2011-07-11T14:20:00.000+01:00

I was recently lucky enough to win the Friday Freebie competition that was run on Twitter by Ces Loftus who tweets under the ID of @Ces_Creatively . Theprize was to have a new flier designed for Grape Vine. The result is stunning and on the first occasion I used them, last weekend, I immediately picked up a new subscriber.

If you are a Business Mum, YOU now have a chance to win £750 worth of design and print services with the talent and support of Ces and printing by Dorset Digital print.

Here is a little more information about Ces and about how to enter:

Ces Loftus (known as @Ces_Creatively on twitter) is a mum of 3 from Poole. In May 2006 her 4th son was still born at full term and she has overcome adversity to make a successful new cyber career. Ces says:

"When my son died I almost died too. During the following few years I had several miscarriages, was grief stricken and went through a rough time on many levels as I lost my business, got into debt and felt like my life was collapsing around me.

Having worked as a brand image designer in agencies across the UK during my fifteen year career before becoming self employed, I set my business back up from scratch with no budget or funding in 2008. Purely by being innovative, self marketing and creating a biz brand buzz online I have taken my business from struggling to flourishing and I want to help other multitasking mums to do the same!".

To celebrate the launch of www.supportivebusinessmums.co.uk and www.biz-brand-buzz.co.uk Ces is giving away £750 worth of design and print. The print of business cards and flyers is being sponsored by Dorset Digital Print. Everyone who applies to #WIN will be given a fantastic free promotional feature on www.supportivebusinessmums.co.uk

TOP 5 TIPS FOR COST EFFECTIVE BRANDING

1. Look at your branding from your ideal customer's perspective. Do you stand out and give them good reasons to choose you?

2. Build credibility through a professional image, compelling content, savvy self promotion and great reviews. Make it easy for people to find and recognise your brand.

3. Be innovative and look for niche angles, collaborations and ways to promote yourself.

4. Maximise your potential to win business through your branded online presence with effective microsites, blogs, twitter usage and facebook fan pages.

5. Remember to engage. Great conversations lead to great opportunities. When people like you and your brand stands out in a positive way they will advocate your business.

So whether you have an existing business or a new venture you can choose any of the following #WIN : professionally designed logo, twitter page, facebook fan page, flyer design and print, business card design and print, website or blog design, banner design, ebooks, and more.

HOW TO ENTER:

Email Ces via ces@creativelyminded.co.uk and request an application form which will form the basis of a feature to promote your business on www.supportivebusinessmums.co.uk All those who enter will be sent details of further opportunities to create a Buzz for your business through Biz Brand Buzz and Supportive Business Mums. Closing date for entries 22nd August 2011.

Are you frustrating your family?

2011-07-07T13:54:00.000+01:00

Here is a question I have been asked several times recently:

"I have started to use my Facebook and Twitter accounts for entering competitions, but my family and non-comping friends keep complaining to me about my constant retweets and status updates, saying I am filling up their timelines with things they don't want to read. What can I do about it?"

On Twitter, one thing you can do is to open a separate account and just use it for comping. Remember to chat with your comping friends as well on that account, because if you do nothing but retweet, your account might get filtered out of Twitter search for being "poor quality" so the promoters wouldn't see your entries. A good guideline is to have at least 1 in 10of your tweets a chat tweet rather then a competition tweet. Twitter WILL allow you to have two accounts, provided you don't tweet the same thing on both. If you run two (or more) accounts both for comping and tweet things to both accounts, you may find that one or both of them gets suspended.

But what if you are happy with your Twitter account as it is and don't want the hassle of juggling two accounts? Well, tell the people who don't like to see your retweets how to get rid of them! What they need to do is to go to YOUR twitter page - not their own - and below your picture at the top, they will see the "Following" button, then a tiny mobile phone icon, then a circular button with arrows pointing around it. If they click on this button, it will stop any retweets that you make from appearing in their own timeline. So they can still follow you and chat to you -but they will no longer be annoyed by all your comping retweets. Job done!

The two account answer won't work for Facebook, because in theory you are not allowed to hold more than one Facebook account. Some people DO, though, and if you want to try it as a solution it might help - but make sure you keep precious information such as photos stored elsewhere because if Facebook ever decides to clamp down on multiple accounts, you could lose both accounts completely.

However once again, there is a way of letting your family stop seeing your comp entries. Unfortunately on Facebook it means they will not see anything you write, unless either they visit your wall or you write on theirs. But if they are happy to keep in touch by checking your page rather than waiting for your updates to appear on theirs, it's an ideal solution. What they need to do is wait until an update from you appears on their page, then click on the little cross that appears on the top right of it and select "Hide all by....(your name)". That way they won't see any of your competition entries but you are still friends, can still visit each other's pages, can still message each other and can still use Facebook chat.

I hope my tips today will save a lot of family arguments!

Hurry! A couple of short notice competitions!

2011-07-03T15:35:00.000+01:00

Just a quick "Hello" from me today as I have spotted two competitions that you need to act on NOW!!!

The June 30th issue of Waitrose Weekend, their free newspaper, contains an entry form with Special K for a draw to win a cheque for £1,000. The newspaper is usually only in stores until Tuesday, so make sure you pick up a copy within the next two days. The competition closes on July 19th - post early as it is a Freepost address. You don't need any qualifier to enter, just the form, and you can make one entry per person per day.

Tesco and Relentless drinks are giving away an overall prize of a set of four VIP tickets to the Leeds or Reading Festival plus a daily prize of a pair of standard tickets to either festival. To enter, text the word Energy to 87080. Texts are charged at your standard rate but may not be included in your free or included text package. One entry per mobile per day. Closing July 12th.