My story: As a young girl at school during the sixties, I had the dream of one day becoming a sculptor and artist. Then suddenly at the age of 17, my whole family relocated to Germany with my father's work and the opportunity of becoming an art student and later an art teacher, was no longer possible. I learned the German language, made friends, settled and later married, but the urge to create drove me to find something to do with my hands.

One day I came across a bag of leather scraps in a shop and was soon piecing them together to make handbags, waistcoats and jackets which I sewed on my grandmother's ancient sewing machine. Soon I was ordering large sacks of offcuts to complete the numerous orders that were coming in. It gave me such a buzz that people liked my creations and were willing to pay for them, especially as the finished articles were made up out of odd scraps and transformed into something beautiful and desirable.