I flew out to Italy on Monday morning. Unfortunately in the last few months I have developed a fear of flying, which wasn’t helped by the recent Madrid crash and the media coverage of every small incident which followed, so I wasn’t much looking forward to it. But the flight was wonderfully smooth and I sat next to a lovely lady called Jean from Manchester who chatted away to me about her grandchildren to take my mind off things. If you are reading this Jean, thank you very much! Jean loved the window seat and got a bit upset when I asked her to shut the blind so that I wouldn’t see the mountains below (I was thinking “how cold would it be if we ended up there”, she was thinking “how pretty”) so I appeased her by asking her to take these pictures for the blog.

“Ooh and why did I wear jeans…it would be impossible to use them as a float”. Jean is smiling at me. “Shall I take another picture, dear” The sea looks lovely from this height. “Brrr to me it just looks cold”. Here we are just about to hit the sea…er.. land.

Relieved to have my feet on solid ground again I took the train along the pretty Ligurian Coast and headed straight for the leather workshop. I usually have to wait until the end of October to hear anything about new leathers but there is already a buzz about some new things - will have to wait until later to see the new colour chart though. Already excited!

Thought you might like to see the Italian countryside we are driving through so I asked M to stop the car and let me take a picture. Italians always want to do the very best though, so instead he drove me to the top of the valley so I could take a picture from there. Look at the ocean.. just a shame we cannot swim at this time of year.

Our next mission was to collect the petrol leather for the bespoke order of Make Me Smile midi bags we are producing. As I reported last week we are using the same leather as Prada and Miu Miu this season and we managed to get the last box of petrol which was headed for their workshop. So ladies… here it is. Step one of your Make Me Smile midi bags! The leather itself. Sometimes we have to check the leather carefully but given that it had been selected for Prada it was obviously the best quality.

And off it goes to the workshop. Aw… my workshop owner is shy. He didn’t want to be photographed so he hid behind it… Stay tuned for more updates.