A team of 9 ran to Barnsley Town Hall to help prepare for the Christmas Elf Workshop!

Christmas at the Town Hall is coming and over 500 families are expected to turn up this weekend to join in the fun. Part of the festive extravaganza is an elf workshop for the kids where they get to decorate a hat with tinsel and other Christmassy things. To prepare for that, Lesley asked if we could fold coloured paper into the correct 'elf hat shape'.

The origami shaping blew Dan's mind to begin with, but after a short period of staring blankly at the template, he got into the swing.

Our other task was to add ribbons to carefully crafted paper baubles. A lot of them. With cub-leader Mark and me as an ex-scout, we had to do the knotting very professionally.

Make sure you put lark's head hitch in and a reef knot at the end!

Connor was taking the knotting very seriously, but concentration was broken as Lesley insisted on giving us all elf names.

Josh, you're Flirty Sugarplum, and Mark is Happy Sparklepants!

Apparently these were not the ones the kids were going to be using, probably for the best. Down the end of the table, Sharon, Grace and Mairead were doing quality control on the elf hats by modelling several of them along with paper bauble earrings. Finally we counted all of our crafts into boxes.

Put your baubles away

With over 250 hats folded and all the ribbon used up on hundreds of paper baubles, we took the opportunity to do a mini chair workout including: * split squats * tricep dips * single leg sits

A little diversion out of the Town Hall and the group had already figured out my plan. We were headed to Fitzwilliam Street, "probably the steepest street in Barnsley", for ten minutes of awesome hill reps before a very gentle jog back to Shaw Lane.