My mum

This is my late mum. I miss her lots. My mum was in her twenties in this picture and she was quite a girl. She was a single career girl who took foreign holidays with her girlfriends and who whizzed around Italy on the back of glamorous Italian boys' scooters.

Don't get me wrong she was always a lady but she was having her fun. She was an independent woman in a time when women were required to have a man's signature on a loan agreement. I was about fifteen years old when I first stumbled on these photographs of a woman I struggled to recognise as my mother and I felt like I was peeking into very adult world that was forbidden to me. When I first read the beautiful poem Before You Were Mine by Carol Anne Duffy it instantly struck a chord.

Now that she's passed away these images are wonderful treasures of the woman who is my mother and who embodies in this photograph everything that I love and admire about her. She was so glamorous and confident and that dress - wow Mum that's a great dress honey!

My mum has bequeathed me many things, a feisty nature, a sense of fun and my creative streak (she was an artist, a painter - and she was outstanding although as with so many talented people she was never aware of it). Sadly she did not bequeath me that dress and so I'll never know what happened to it but in homage to my fabulous mother who has given me so many things I'll make this dress and find just the right fabric. Thanks Mum for the inspiration.