Fat of the Land photographs by Carmen Corbalen

Fat of the Land photographs by Ochi Reyes

The last chorus

People singing the final chorus of The Queer Fat Harvest Hymn, courtesy of Kay Hyatt.

Winners and other notices

Congratulations to all the competition winners!

Best Jam: Mike
Best Chutney: BJ
Best Decorated Cupcakes: Phoebe
Best Cake (Fancy): Kay
Best Cake (Teatime): Lenna
Best Vegetable Monster (Junior): Max
Best Vegetable Monster (Senior): Suzanna

The Diet Box of Doom is to be donated to 'Dr' Gillian McKeith. More about this later.

Thank you everyone for coming, for supporting us, and for making this event such a fantastic success.

Thanks to all the fatty queers

Pic by Emli Bendixen, see more of her incredible photos of The Fat of the Land.

Thanks to everyone for making The Fat of the Land such a rip-roaring success! Special thanks to my co-organisers Jason, Naz, and Bill, and all the volunteers, stall-holders, and supporters. Nearly 200 people came, we pretty much ran out of cakes and savouries, and the tea and squash flowed from the time that BJ cut the ribbon to the last of the Morris dancing. Everyone seemed to have a great time and we made enough money to cover our expenses. Thank you all!

A couple of things:

There's a Fat of the Land page on Facebook, and you can become a fan if you are so inclined. Just click the "Become a fan" button.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Fat-of-the-Land-A-Queer-Chub-Harvest-Festival/145532791657

We would love to see your own pics and videos of the day, you can upload them onto the Facebook page or link to them there, if you are a fan, or get in touch with us via this blog for us to upload here (more people see the blog than the Facebook stuff).

We'd also love to keep the discussions and the community going, so please chip in on the blog or the Facebook page with thoughts, recollections of the day (check out what Crazycrone said), ideas for how we might all take the good feeling from yesterday onwards, perhaps into future projects.

Ok, tired now.

Phew, they arrived, just in time

Everyone who comes to The Fat of the Land will get a free badge, a bit like the ones in the poorly executed photograph here.

Harvesting veg this morning

Kay and I went to the outrageously lovely East London community vegetable garden What Will The Harvest Be? to harvest some veg for a hamper for the Fat of the Land Raffle. We picked celeriac, celery, carrots, some spuds, amazing kale, chard and squash, some herbs and greens, beetroot too. Yummmmmmm and thanks to Chris at the project and everyone who's been growing things there over the summer.

Sublime and ridiculous

DIVA are going to be at The Fat of the Land: A Queer Chub Harvest Festival this Saturday. they've made a cut-out cover of their current fat issue for you to poke your head through. You too can be a glamazon lesbo high femme magazine cover chubber. Amazing.

Kay's Jammy and Karrotty Thrills!

Kay 'Butch Husky' Hyatt has been busy this weekend making two dozen jars of Chubster jam as well as getting her Krazy Karrots game ready. The jam is made from damsons from the tree in Kay's garden and will be for sale at the Fat of the Land. You'll have to wait until next Saturday to find out how the Karrots work. Will the harvest thrills ever end?

Stalls at the Fat of the Land

We've got some amazing stalls at the Fat of the Land, with stuff for you to buy, stuff to eat, stuff at which to marvel, and displays of crafts and activities that are close to our queer chub hearts.

Not only will you be able to buy zines, but there'll be a zine display and you'll be able to make a zine on the day too. Naughty and Nice Cakes are likely to be popular, and Anna Small is bringing her crafts – double pleasure whammy. Blackwells are bringing a selection of Fat of the Land books for you to snap up (they accept plastic too) and DIVA mag, whose Fat issue is now out, are going to be doing the tombola. We've got displays of stonemasonry and quilting, there will be Yay! Scales for you to try out thanks to the crowd from Health At Every Size UK, a Krazy Karrots game, and some mad things that don't have a name yet. And we've got a lot of tea that needs drinking.

Simon 'Weasel' Murphy has been busy making the Chubuzzer which will receive its inaugural outing at the Fat of the Land (see pic above). Homemade fat queer electronics projects! Yay! Dare you pit your wits against its buzzery goodness? How fiendishly difficult could it be? There'll be prizes for those who make it to the end.

Three Cheers for BJ, Our Guest of Honour

BJ is doing us the honour of being our esteemed guest at the Fat of the Land. She will cut the ribbon to open the event at 2pm sharp.

BJ! One of my fat queer heroes. The first time I met her I knew I'd never forget her. Dawn French was making a programme about fat and art for the South Bank Show in 1994 or thereabouts. A bunch of fat oiks, including BJ and I, were roped in to give the programme some colour. This involved swimming around Dawn F in formation around the beautiful Marshall Street Baths, just off Carnaby Street. We were kept pretty separate from Dawn, she was clearly out of our league, but I remember BJ clinging to me with her legs because she wasn't a strong swimmer back then. Thrills!

Like all the best people, BJ manages to straddle high and low culture. In 1997 she won the inaugural Miss Lesbian Beauty Competition at the Café de Paris, organised by Amy Lamé. Some people were really upset that a big fat dyke could steal the prize from under their noses, there were letters of complaint to The Pink Paper about it! But BJ won fairly and squarely, and she deserved to win too. She's been a muse to Vivienne Westwood, photographed by Del la Grace Volcano, and the award-winning artist Sadie Lee's painting of BJ, entitled Pinky, has shown at the National Portrait Gallery (see the pic above).

If BJ was the type of person to appear in the Sunday colour supplements, she'd likely be described there as a living legend or an institution. Raw, brave and fierce, my favourite memories of BJ include the sight of her throwing bottles of champagne around a dive bar, strutting in a bikini at London Fields Lido, and flirting as though it were an Olympic sport. She's bad to the bone and impossible not to love.

Anyway, you'll get to meet her on 3 October at 2pm.

Get your laughing gear 'round this, fatties

Sachi is making cakes for us. Yummy yum yum yum.

Naughty and Nice Cakes.

Unskinny Bop: The Posters

Unskinny Bop is a nightclub that started out from the dregs of Ladyfest 2002, an event where many of the people I think of as my friends first clapped eyes on each other. In the intervening seven years, The Bop has been home to an evolving bunch of misfits, club kids, cool people, and their mates. My happiest ever dancefloor moments have been at this place, Ruth and Tamsin can keep you dancing until you're begging your feet to stop.

One of the amazing things about The Bop is the artwork that's displayed every month. This is the work of Bill Savage. By artwork I mean the posters that decorate the venue. They show that pop culture, politics, music, a queer sensibility and dancing go together very well. Bill's work is absolutely beautiful, you may have seen some of it in the current edition of DIVA magazine.

Anyway, she is going to be exhibiting her posters at the Fat of the Land, and has donated some original art to the raffle. Be sure to show your appreciation.

Love to The Fat of the Land

We've been getting messages of support for Fat of the Land from activists and allies people around the world. This is from Susan Stinson, celebrated author. If you love what she's written here you'll be excited to hear that she has donated some of her beautiful books for the raffle, don't forget to buy a ticket.

Last night at the Three County Fair, I took a break from what a sweet-faced young man near me in the crowd of those who hadn’t paid extra for a seat in the grandstand happily called “demolition derby at its finest” to wander past the beer shed. There I watched as a fat woman, a fat man and a thin man threw themselves into complicated dance moves that had the men doing a Fred-and-Ginger turn cheek-to-cheek. In the Exhibition Hall, I noted that the winner of the scarecrow contest was a broom with blonde braids, a green boa and a Viking hat. A second prize cabbage head had a string bean smile. There was an exhibit on the benefits of earthworms in the rabbitry. The winner of Best in the Show in Youth Needlework had made a sinister figure in a fuzzy suit with a cravat and half a facemask, which suggested a cross between the Phantom of the Opera and Edgar Allen Poe. I note these details in your honor, celebrants at The Fat of The Land. I was a fat dyke alone at the fair, but I danced in the music tent when a rock band came on. The rough-throated singer wrote songs about little girls turning up the amp. Guitar, drums, bass. I stomped around the tent pole, bringing in a harvest of sweat. I turned everything loose. I thought of you, so far away. I thought of you.

Susan Stinson
Northampton, MA
9.7.09

Allyson Mitchell is Showing at the Fat of the Land

We are delighted to present an exhibition of Allyson Mitchell's work at the Fat of the Land.

Allyson is an artist and activist who lives in Toronto. Her incredible body of work includes Deep Lez and Lady Sasquatch, not to mention film-making and community performance. She is a whirlwind of brilliance. I can't begin to explain what she does, the best thing is for you to go to her website and immerse yourself in a world of fur, big-eyed dolls, strangeness and macramé.

www.allysonmitchell.com

Lady Morris dancers will be in the house at The Fat of the Land

Say hello to your new friends at The Blackhorse and Standard Women’s North West Morris, they've been dancing for nearly 30 years, and they're going to be making a special appearance at The Fat of the Land. Thrills!

The Blackhorse and Standard Morris do a kind of traditional English dance which originated with north west mill workers in the 19th century. They wear distinctive outfits, including the clogs that working people wore back then, and accessories that reflect what was to hand at the time, like garlands, bobbins and sticks. The Blackhorse and Standard perform a mixture of old and new dances, with names like Beauknot, Grenocide and Walthamstow Market. Have a look at their Flickr stream for photographs.

Make sure you don't miss them on 3 October!

Vegetable monsters

What Will the Harvest Be? is a beautiful community garden in E15. They've been growing a mass of vegetables all summer and on Saturday they held a Harvest Festival which involved harvesting, cooking and eating some of what they'd grown. Lovely!

There was also an impressive selection of vegetable monsters on display. Watch and learn, Harvest folk. Details of how to enter your own vegetable monsters to our competition will be posted shortly.