“The council is pulling down my father’s shop for a roundabout. These are the last bags I’ll ever sew in it.” – Why a 72-year-old Somerset quilter is selling her last sewing duffles at a special price

The envelope came in September, a thick brown one with the council crest in the corner. Inside were a plan, a valuation and one sentence Jocelyn Pettifer has read more times than she’d care to admit: the property is to be acquired under a compulsory purchase order, and the building will be demolished.

The shop in question is a narrow stone building on the Bath Road at the edge of Frome, Somerset, with a hand-painted sign her father put up in 1961 and a bell over the door that has rung for sixty-five years. The road outside is being widened for a new roundabout. On the engineers’ drawing, the new kerb runs straight through the middle of the front counter.

“They were perfectly polite about it, I’ll give them that,” Jocelyn says. “A young man came round with a clipboard and apologised twice. But a roundabout is a roundabout. My father’s shop is in the way of it, and that’s rather the end of the conversation.”

The back room behind the counter

The front of the shop still looks the way Reg left it: glass cabinets of bobbins and presser feet, a wall of old cast-iron machine heads waiting for parts, a brass till nobody has used since decimalisation. The real work happens behind a curtain at the back. There are bolts of quilting cotton on pine shelves, a pegboard covered in reels of thread, a long scarred workbench – and two flattened removal boxes leaning against the doorframe that weren’t there last month.

Jocelyn sits at a black Singer with gold decals, a half-finished duffle panel under the needle. Her tortoiseshell glasses have slipped to the end of her nose. A little radio on the windowsill is tuned to Radio 4, turned down low.

“Dad always said a sewing machine will outlive whoever owns it, so long as you oil it,” she says, guiding a curve of appliqué under the foot. “He was right about that. He just never imagined the building wouldn’t.”

She doesn’t sound bitter. Mostly she sounds practical. “The road needs doing. I sit in that queue like everybody else. I just wish they’d found the eleven feet somewhere else.”

37 years, about 3,800 bags, one workbench

Jocelyn learned to sew in this room. She was nine, perched on a stool next to her father, and he set her in front of a little black 1951 Featherweight he’d taken in part-exchange. “He told me if I could sew a straight line on that, I could sew anything,” she remembers. “It took me most of a summer.”

The duffle came much later. In 1989 a friend from her Women’s Institute sewing circle, Hilda, complained that she had no decent way to carry her blocks, her thread and her scissors to the big spring quilt show in Bath. Jocelyn sewed her a bag over a long weekend: cream cotton, hand-quilted, with a little black sewing machine appliquéd on the front – a copy of her dad’s Featherweight – surrounded by reels of thread, a tomato pincushion and a tape measure.

Hilda carried it to the show. By Sunday afternoon, six women had asked where she’d got it.

In the 37 years since, Jocelyn has made about 3,800 of them – roughly two a week, every one cut, appliquéd, hand-quilted and finished at this bench. Each takes her around twenty hours. No factory, no helpers, no machine embroidery. “People ask why I never took anyone on,” she says. “Because then it isn’t my bag any more. It’s somebody else’s bag with my name on it.”

Why one of Jocelyn’s duffles is nothing like the ones online

Pick one up and the first thing you notice is that it doesn’t feel like a shop-bought bag. It has a soft, solid weight to it. The hand-quilting gives the outside a gentle padded texture you can feel with your fingertips, and the sewing machine on the front isn’t printed – it sits slightly raised, because it is a separate piece of fabric stitched down round every edge.

Every duffle carries the same scene: the little sewing machine in the middle, reels of thread on one side, a pincushion, scissors, buttons and a tape measure curling across the bottom. The colours change from design to design. The machine is always there.

“If one reel sits a little lower than on the last bag, that’s not a mistake,” Jocelyn says. “That’s how you know a person made it and not a printer.”

• The one-bench rule. Every duffle is cut, appliquéd, hand-quilted and finished by Jocelyn herself – no factory, no production line, no second pair of hands.
• A hand-quilted cotton shell. Stitched row by row by hand, which gives the bag its soft padding, its shape and its one-of-a-kind texture.
• The signature sewing machine appliqué. Machine, reels, pincushion, scissors and buttons, each cut from fabric and sewn on individually – some with a raised, three-dimensional edge.
• Premium cotton over polyester wadding. Soft in the hand, but sturdy enough to stand up on its own even when it’s packed full.
• Padded quilted handles that stay comfortable when the bag is loaded with fabric and notions.
• A YKK wraparound zip that opens the whole top wide, so you can see and reach everything inside.
• 46 × 23 × 23 centimetres of room. Enough for a quilt in progress, fat quarters, thread, scissors and a rotary cutter – or a full weekend’s worth of clothes.
• Five designs: Crimson Floral, Lavender Garden, Sunny Gingham, Cornflower Blue and Teal Notions.

“Some of my ladies have carried the same bag for twenty years”

What Jocelyn is proudest of isn’t how a duffle looks the day it leaves the shop. It’s how it looks years later, after a few hundred sewing-group evenings and a few dozen quilting weekends.

“A lady from Shropshire brought hers back in last spring,” she says. “She bought it in 2006. The handles were worn soft and one corner had faded where it sat in her car window. She didn’t want it mended. She wanted a second one, exactly the same, for her daughter, who’d just taken up quilting. That’s the nicest thing anybody can say to me.”

Tucked into the frame of her bench mirror is a Christmas card from one of her long-standing customers:

It’s going in the first box she packs.

What the road is actually taking

Jocelyn isn’t losing her craft. She’s losing the room it lives in.

The east window that throws early light across the bench by seven in the morning. The bell over the front door. The pencil marks on the doorframe where her father measured her every birthday until she was twelve. The kettle that has boiled every working morning since the Silver Jubilee. The council is paying a fair price for the building, she says. It isn’t paying for any of that, because there’s no box on the form for it.

“I’m not starting again somewhere else at seventy-two,” she says. “You can’t rent a shop in this town and pay for it sewing bags. When I lock that door on New Year’s Eve, that’s it. There won’t be a bag number 3,801.”

Right now, about 180 finished duffles sit on the shelves in the back room – the last of the stock she always sews ahead for the spring quilt show. Whatever hasn’t found a home by 31 December has nowhere to go.

Why she’d rather let them go for £49

So Jocelyn has made a decision. Instead of £99, the last duffles are £49 each – less than half what she has charged for years.

“I’m not going to haggle with the council, and I’m not going to haggle with my customers either,” she says. “I didn’t spend thirty-seven years making these so they could sit in a rented storage unit off the A361. I want every one of them on somebody’s arm, off to a sewing group or a quilting weekend or the grandchildren’s. They can have the building. They’re not having my bags.”

It is the one part of all this she still gets to decide, and she intends to do it properly.

What women who carry one say

Where to get one before they’re gone

Jocelyn’s duffles are sold in one place only: Cedar and Tin, the small online shop her granddaughter Tamsin (24) runs for her.

“Tamsin does all the computer side,” Jocelyn says. “I can thread a needle in a dark room, but don’t ask me to build a website. At the moment she’s mostly taping up parcels. We want every one of them gone before the diggers arrive.”

One word of warning: as the bag has become better known, cheap printed copies have started appearing on the big online marketplaces. In a listing photo they look similar. In your hands they are a flat printed picture on thin fabric. The originals from Jocelyn’s bench are only available through Cedar and Tin – and once these last 180 are gone, there won’t be any more, because there won’t be a back room to make them in.

Only until New Year’s Eve – then the shop is gone

Between the £49 price and the deadline, the last duffles are going faster than Jocelyn and Tamsin expected.

It’s the last chance to own a genuinely hand-quilted, hand-appliquéd piece from a woman who learned to sew in this very room in 1963 – before the bell over the door rings for the last time and the road crews move in.

The bottom line

This is the sewing bag you’ll carry for the next twenty years.

Every one is the work of one pair of hands, and it shows the minute you hold it. Every time you head off to your sewing group, a quilting weekend or to see the grandchildren, you take a little piece of a Somerset sewing shop with you.

A useful, beautiful bag with a real story – and, for a few more weeks, a way to make sure one woman’s life’s work leaves through the front door instead of in the back of a skip.

Thank you, Jocelyn. 🧵🌹

The internet doesn’t want Jocelyn’s shop to close