This is the final quilt in my series for Femina that charts the life stories of the women in my family from the 1920s to the 1970s. 20 in the 1970s I was a baby boomer, born in 1954 and, by that time, my mother had developed great aspirations for both me and my sister, realising too late for herself, how important a good education was. She drilled this into both of us that meant, for my sister and me, our twenties were spent at university achieving the degrees that, as she saw it, would allow...

My mother was born in 1921 in a small village in the Potteries and so her 20s were inevitably shaped by the impact of World War 2. Having left school aged 14, she began work as an office clerk and met my father in a cycling club in 1936. Four years later the war started and they quickly got married before my father left to join the army. For a short time, my mother became a land girl and then, tiring of farm work, she went to London. Here, she worked in the drafting department of an...

My series of quilts for Femina draws on my family history. They interrogate the lives of my grandmother, my mother and my own by asking what was life like for three generations of 20 year old women? Our family history is, sadly, rather sketchy, so I have been trying to piece it together. Stitching these stories is one way to do it. FEMINA 1 20 in the 1920s My grandmother was born in 1901 and so, her 20s were played out in the 1920s, a time of great change for women in the UK following the...