I think if I could sew or paint I wouldn’t write a thing.

I used to draw and paint a lot as a child but school put me off. Sewing was also a nightmare. I never finished my apron in Miss Whittaker’s class, although I made lots of strange garments for my dolls. I always hated to see a naked doll. Their cold plastic limbs made me anxious. Action man has helped me through that and a few other traumas from childhood.

I love material: silk, satin, cotton, wool - any textile you care to name – buttons, bits of lace, ribbon - collect and hoard them in big clumsy trunks like a mad woman, get them out and stroke them like pets. Sometimes I just arrange them on my bed like the old lady at the Bates Motel.

A while ago, I ran a class with two textile artists –Margaret Williams and Cath Walshaw and fell in love with the idea of combining textiles with words – this is still something I’m really interested in. Would love to produce poetry books which looked like this

This is what I did to part of a poem from the new book, called Star gazing.