As a child I showed little interest in my mum’s sewing skills. After she died, I realised what I’d missed out on | Nova Weetman

She filled my wardrobe with patchwork skirts and home-knitted vests and a dark-green corduroy coat – things that I would kill for now

There is a photograph of a very young me wearing a homemade A-line denim dress with a peace sign boldly embroidered on the front. Mum made me the dress for an anti-nuclear rally sometime in the mid-1970s. I don’t remember wearing it that day, or being carried on my dad’s shoulders as we marched with thousands of protesters, but I do recall wearing many of the other clothes Mum made me as a child.

There was a lemon floor-length cotton number that she pintucked by hand for my role as the narrator in the school play that would swish around my ankles as I walked across the stage. And a white cropped top that she splattered with neon paint, designed to show up under the fluorescent lights of the Blue Light disco when I was in my Wham phase and trying to attract a boy I liked from school. But my favourite was the spotted taffeta bubble skirt of my dreams that I wore to the high school formal, inspired by Molly Ringwald in Pretty in Pink.