A week of fun and friends - and a good deal of hard work!

I got stuck in traffic this morning and looking out of my car window, look what I saw...

Sadly not what it seemed, and Edward wasn't at work there - it was the top of a ride at Hull Fair which is always held the second week in October. Though the brandy snap stand wasn't open for business when I drove past in this direction, by the time I drove back, the lights were on and there was even a parking space right nearby so I could jump out and make the purchase!

I've been at the Fashion and Embroidery exhibition with the Textile Treasures at Harrogate since last Wednesday, and when we'd finished packing up last night, I drove over to Hull so that I could spend an hour or two with Mummy before coming back to Gloucestershire today. Another 650 miles on the clock this week.

We got off to a good start and managed to get a few bits of our exhibition up before we were shooed out of the Harrogate showground at 6pm and went in search of a pub with food somewhere near our temporary home in Nidderdale. More of a challenge than we thought but after a bit of a detour we found The Wellington Inn

It was quite a lucky find and Susan decided we had earned a bottle of Champagne - delicious! (Thanks, Susan!) The food was yummy - we ate there three times and felt quite at home, so warm was the welcome (and so tender the steak....)

We took around 12 hours to set up the exhibition, which has 300 items in it, and finished around 6pm on Thursday, ready for the Friday opening.

This was the view for most of Friday, Saturday and Sunday! The exhibition is amazing and the comments left in the visitors book include almost every superlative we could dream of. Anyone unlucky to miss it so far can catch up in Cardiff next month, then Brighton, Glasgow and Birmingham next year.

As we drove to and from the showground, we got to see some of Harrogate but not much. Mostly we saw this

At lunchtime, we found a sunny step to sit on and the view from the other side of the building was somewhat better.

The show finished at 5pm Sunday afternoon and we set to immediately to take down and pack. We left the showground at 7.30pm, somewhat cream crackered, all four of us.

The exciting thing was meeting so many friends: Artful Dodger friends, WI member friends, knitty friends, stitchy friends, ladies who proudly announced their part in some of the textile treasures, Kate from the Quilters Guild who turned out to be my exact contemporary at St Johns, York all those years ago, and Margaret, WI steward who went to the same school as I did, in Hull. We were so well versed in our German conjunctions by good old "Bill" Sykes that we could still recite them word for word. It was as if we'd written them all in our "Sykes Guide to Success" yesterday.

And of course, my colleagues, the real Textile Treasures; Pat, Sue, Sue and Susan - cheers team!!