I started dressmaking when I was seven or eight years old, making clothes for my dolls. Next I was making clothes for my newborn brother and then, myself. I made clothes for my children and now, for my grand-daughter.

However, my passion for at least 25 years has been patchwork quilts – initially, they were a way of using left over pieces of dressmaking fabrics. Now, I have a stash of patchwork-specific fabrics that embarrasses me to the extent that, in recent times, I have tried to increase my quilt production! Inexorably I keep buying fabrics, so am not making much headway in reducing that stash! The selection of fabrics, purchase and bringing them home, to enjoy placing them amongst my other fabrics, in various combinations, has become as big a passion as the patchworking and quilting.

My quilts are never works of perfection or intricacy that might have made them exhibition pieces. There is more often a crudity or quirkiness about them that displays something of the barnyard, but the many quilts gifted have never failed to be attractive and useful additions to the recipient’s home. Quiltmaking has been the closest I can get to applying paint to canvas so, in the nature of a true artist, I have always signed my initials, and dated each quilt – in quilting stitches.