Autumn begins with West Fest, food, flowers & fabric

Apart from planting some beautiful Bud violas in all shades of purple to ensure autumnal flowering in the Moregeous garden, we’ve had a packed, artistic and delicious start to the new season. It started with Burton Road’s end of summer festival West Fest 2012, organised by Didsbury Life and enjoyed by hundreds of locals, including us! The sun (remember it? now long gone!) shone and lots of cake & cocktails were the order of the day. Rhubarb’s incredibly crunchy fried chicken knocked spots off the long past it’s heyday Kentucky and our Sunday seafood spectacular was served by the cutest waiter this side of the Adriatic, Luca in Azzurro, working hard and saving all his tips!

It’s amazing to live and work somewhere so packed full of incredible independents and so enthusiastically supported by the community – I love it!

Suited and booted a week later for the glam Diary Party at the plush Lowry Hotel (thanks Dianne!) before heading up to the subterranean creative space 2022NQ for friend Amanda McCrann’s Smashed exhibition. Mr M had been one of the ‘Mancunians’ photographed, quite by chance as he wandered up Burton Rd to get a sarnie for his lunch. I was looking forward to seeing my MancMan up in black & white but he was up on the wall at Love 2 Eat cafe instead – must call in!

Nice to have a few drinks with the gang and see some of my beloved metro tiles in situ on the walls of the basement 🙂

As usual the glamour didn’t last long and it was right back down to muckiness the next day as I dug around in our basement for a piece of furniture to work some magic on. I’ve always avoided anything to do with upholstery as it’s such a specialist thing to do but my appetite was whetted during filming HBH when I’d no choice but to up-cycle and re-cover four dining room chairs, then also had the pleasure of watching expert Glynn Smallwood create a magnificent headboard and sofa. When I found out in August that there was a basic upholstery course starting literally five minutes from my house, my cheque was in the post before the ink dried  🙂

Full story on my next post, but suffice to say there’s some fab material in my bag waiting for Day 2 of the course and I now own the most expensive fabric scissors in John Lewis!

Little teaser, this is my work-in-progress below: