Who said you can't trust a person who, when left alone in a room with a tea cosy, fails to put it on her head? This one, knitted with a passed on pattern from ma-in-law, is supposed to look like it's got a teacup on its head. I stopped reading the instructions at a crucial point, rebel that I am, so it just looks like a slightly bent over old dear or somebody with a sack on their head. But hell it's my first time! I feel proud and round and stout.

I've been doing more sewing than I've ever done in my life, or maybe since I was 9 or 10 and was obssessed by sewing bits of lace or material onto my clothes. I haven't progressed much skill-wise, but I am really loving it. I made a load of book covers for Christams presents, just with nice pieces of material saved over years, decades even. And now I am experimenting with doilies - another thing I have collected - that lace thing, the intricacy, the HOLES - and sewing them on to random garments like this one. Even wearing them. And now, with the help of lovely Amy, I am attempting a skirt out of a piece of material I bought in a charity shop in Saltburn. Have also been to the Quilt exhibition at the V and A - it's on until July and well worth a visit. Some amazing work there - which doesn't make me think, why bother? you're crap! - which I often get when I read / hear brilliant writing, in terms of my own work. Strange - I just get inspired and ecstatic at the sight of it.

I'm really interested in this. I think it's about expectation and how we judge ourselves, which undoubtedly begins with how we are judged by others. Also the thing about sewing - my generation downgraded it as traditional women's work, stuff we didn't want to do anymore(even though I still got my gran, queen of the treadle, to alter the strange baggy men's trousers I picked up at jumble sales for my chic feminist look). We put it with housework and childcare and we wanted to do other things. Tough to discover in my latter years that earth mother might have been a better option. Ha just kidding! But younger women maybe more able to recognise the creativity in women's work, and not worry if they enjoy doing it.

Mrs Robinson’s Dress

Oyster moygashel, silk lined
in palest pink only a pearl
would dare to insert herself

into that world. She projects
her lighthouse beam across
every dollared pageant

of Los Angeles. She’s so tall
in her stilletos she can see
clear across the top of her husband’s

balding head, his thick specs
level with her cone-shaped breasts.
She locks double-lashed eyes

with Benjamin, tender
as a new born rabbit.
He is a snack, a morsel

a between the courses treat.
He’s meat. He cannot speak.
Later, she throws the dress

into the trash. Her maid
retrieves it, gives it closet space
until her oldest son comes out.

His Mrs Robinson act, a revelation
from port to shining port,
gains him access to

the captain’s table, the
first mate’s bed. Until
he jumps ship at Shields

sheds the dress.
His loss, my gain.
So here’s to you, Mrs Robinson.