We have had so many prizes come in over the last few days, far too many for the raffle, so we sat down yesterday & had a brainstorm & came up with a couple of greatidea for you to get your hands on some great items.

Sharon, who has had the task of aquiring many of the items has written today's blog, so over to Sharon.

4HTA AUCTIONS

We’ve been given four fabulous hotel prizes for our auctions by clients of Vital Signs & Graphics, so thanks for that Sharon!

Regular Auction

Hotel du Vin is a very stylish chain of boutique style hotels and they’ve very kindly given us three separate prizes for three of their lovely hotels, all including dinner, bed & breakfast. These are worth up to £215.00 each. This is a real treat for a romantic break away from the pressures of work, and well worth a punt for a measly old £1 entry fee! These prizes will be the top 3 in our regular auction, where punters pay £1 fee to place as many bids as they like on any one of the prizes up for auction. The bids will be public so anyone can come along and ‘up the ante’. Hopefully we’ll create a good-natured bidding war. The winner will be the highest bid, and the bidder will pay us the amount bid for the prize won. There are several other auction items going in this auction:

• Boiler service (Premier Plumbing)
• Soft-close toilet seat (!) (Tiling plus)
• Jewellery set (Darren Dewhurst)
• Deep tissue massage (WBC Physiotherapy)
• African print (Sarah Hough)
• £15 Gift set voucher (Gifted Originals Toy Shops)
• Gardeners’ gift set (Olive & Rose)
• Ceramic jug (Tone von Krogh Ceramics)
• 10 week course of lessons in Maths or English (Kip McGrath)
• TBC: Gift from Lace Lingerie

Lowest unique bid auction

Top Manchester Hotel, The Arora (sadly not related to Rajeev Arora from everyone’s’ favourite printing.com!), another of Sharon’s clients, has donated a B&B night at their chic, 4* hotel right in the heart of the city. This is a fantastic opportunity to combine a great night out in the city with a relaxing night in a luxury hotel. This prize, worth approx £169.00, will go into our ‘Lowest unique bid’ auction along with a champagne lunch for 4 at Damson (value £150.00)and a set of hair straighteners donated by Bliss Hair Salon (value £100.00), In this type of auction, punters pay £1 fee for every bid they make. You can make as many bids as you like, on as many of the prizes as you like….it’s £1 each time you bid. The winning bid for each separate auction prize will be the lowest, unique amount recorded for that prize. So, if the lowest recorded bid for any prize is 0.05p but three people bid that amount then it isn’t a winning bid. The winner will be the next lowest amount that’s been bid by one bidder only….ie it’s UNIQUE!

Make sense? It’s easy once you get your head round it! We did this in our first festival 2 years ago and it was great fun and attracted loads of attention. This time round it’ll be an on-line competition, with PC’s supplied by Dave of Heatons Computers. Dave will be in a gazebo of his own, next to the 4HTA ‘mother ship’ so go along and say hello and place your bid.