Witches of the Rose

I work solitary, but I like to have contact with other witches/pagans. I'm a member of some Dutch forums, e-mail lists and I read a lot on the WWW. Those forums organize meetings and I regularly visit the Heksencafé (Witches' Cafe) in Amsterdam and sometimes Utrecht.
On one of the forums someone asked if others wanted to meet somewhere in Amsterdam (Heksencafé didn't exist yet). As I live not that far from Amsterdam, I decided to give it a go. We met in De Roos, Centre for Creative and Spiritual Development next to the Vondelpark. We started of with 5 to 8 people (1 male), who met every few weeks. We just talked and drank tea in the sunroom. That went on for some months. Slowly only a few regulars remained. We had nice and interesting discussions.
Four of us wanted more than talking and tea so we formed our own little group. In honour of our first meeting point we decided to call ourselves "Witches of The Rose" (I use WotR for short). To keep in contact online we started a Yahoo Group. It's a closed group, but you can see a pic of the basket of roses we made for Midsummer weekend, which we celebrated with a mixture of other Pagan groups (a druid grove, a wicca coven and several others). The rituals felt great and the power was overwhelming. We had a great weekend! WotR started off almost a year ago. I won't post their names, but as we all chose an element I'll call them by theirs if I post (I am Water). We celebrated the esbats together. One of us (in turn) is the host for the meeting at her home and we mostly do self-written rituals. In the beginning a bit insecure and giggly, but the more we worked together the better it felt.
At our last gathering (Blue Moon) we talked and decided to change some things. Meeting every moon has become more difficult because of moves, work and study. So from now on we'll be a sabbath group. Our next ritual will be for Mabon. Up until now the host did most of the work in making a ritual. The others had their own input though. Next time we want to make the ritual more together, in our group chatroom and using the e-maillist. It's a challenge, but I like it! I'm doing some more research and meditation on Mabon to come up with my part.