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“My thumb can’t push the needle any more. These are the last ones.” Why a 71-year-old Forest of Dean seamstress is selling her fawn bags online for the first and the last time

Every June, a fallow doe leaves her fawn in the bracken at the bottom of Avril Teague’s garden. For 49 winters Avril has sewn those spots into a soft little handbag. Now her right hand has told her to stop. 57 are left, on sale until 20 December.

By Clemency Rudd · 2 days ago · 9 min read

Clemency Rudd writes about rural craft and the people behind it in the villages of Gloucestershire and the Welsh Marches.

Avril Teague is 71 years old. Since 1977 she has sewn 3,140 of these little half-moon handbags on the same black Singer her mother bought in 1952. Fifty-seven of them are sitting on her kitchen table right now, wrapped in tissue paper. After those, there won’t be any more.

She isn’t stopping because the Singer broke. It still hums the way it did the year the Queen came to the throne. She isn’t stopping because people lost interest, either. She’s stopping because the joint at the base of her right thumb has worn down so far that she can no longer push a needle through the dense backing of the fur, and the last part of every bag is done by hand.

“My thumb can’t push the needle any more,” she says, rubbing the knuckle with her other hand. “These are the last ones.”

The 57 bags on the table are the softest she has ever made. Short, silky faux fur, printed with the pale spots of a fallow fawn, cut from a pattern she traced off her mother’s winter muff, finished with silver rings and a chain of polished silver beads. For 49 years she sold them in exactly one place: the Christmas fair in Parkend village hall. This year, her granddaughter is putting them online. For the first time, and for the last.

The Last Seamstress at the Christmas Fair

When Avril carried her first bags into that village hall in 1977, there were 31 women from around the Forest selling things they had sewn at home: aprons, quilts, mittens, Sunday frocks for little girls. By 1995 there were fourteen. Last December there were two. The other one, Joan Kear from Yorkley, makes tea cosies.

It isn’t that nobody wants the bags. Avril’s table is usually bare by noon. It’s that nobody wants to learn how to make them. Her granddaughter Imogen, 26, is a physiotherapist in Bristol and has watched her grandmother sew since she could stand on a kitchen chair.

“I can sew on a button and take up my work trousers,” Imogen says. “But I tried to line up the spots across a seam once and it looked as if the fawn had walked into a hedge. Gran does it without even looking. That’s fifty years in her hands. You can’t watch a video and get that.”

When Avril puts the cover on the Singer this winter, the Forest loses the last woman who sews these bags. The muff pattern goes into a drawer with her.

A Stone Cottage, a Singer and a Muff From 1951

The cottage sits at the end of a lane outside Parkend, where the gardens run up against the oaks of the Forest. Avril’s parents bought it in 1949. The sewing table stands under the kitchen window, because, as Avril says, “the light’s better and the kettle’s closer.”

Her mother Dulcie was the first to sew at that table. In the long, damp Forest winters of the 1950s, Dulcie made hand muffs for the women at chapel: soft, round, lined, a little pocket of warmth for the walk home after evening service. When Avril turned 22, in the winter of 1977, Dulcie’s own muff had worn through. Instead of throwing it out, Avril laid it flat on a brown paper bag from the grocer’s and traced round it with a pencil.

That brown paper half-moon is still pinned to the wall above the Singer. Every single bag she has made since was cut from it.

The spots came that June. A fallow doe left her newborn fawn in the bracken at the bottom of the garden, the way does do, and went off to graze. “It lay there two whole days and never moved,” Avril says. “All those little white spots in the sun. I thought, if I could ever make something that pretty, I’d be happy.” She has watched a fawn in that bracken nearly every June since. She has never touched one.

Six Things Fifty Years at One Table Put Into Every Bag

None of this is complicated on paper. All of it takes years before the hands get it right. Each bag takes her about six hours, from the first cut to the last stitch.

1. The cut from behind

Avril lays the paper pattern on the back of the fur and cuts only the thin backing with a pair of small embroidery scissors, a few millimetres at a time. Cut from the front with big shears and you get a bald, chopped edge. Cut from behind and the hairs stay long, so the seam disappears.

2. The spots that keep running

On a real fawn, the spots run in soft rows along the back. Avril lays the two halves of every bag side by side until the rows meet at the seam, so the pattern seems to carry on round the bag. It’s the step Imogen could never copy, and the reason no two bags look exactly alike.

3. The seam on the Singer

Right sides together, Avril sews the halves on the old Singer while she pushes the fur inward with a knitting needle, an inch ahead of the presser foot. It’s slow. It’s also why there are no stray hairs trapped in the stitching.

4. Combing the seam out

Once the bag is turned right side out, she sits with a long pin and lifts the hairs out of the seam, one small section at a time, until the seam vanishes under the fur. On a good bag you have to hunt for it.

5. Finishing by hand

The lining goes in by hand. So do the two large silver rings at the top corners, stitched on through the backing with a heavy needle and her mother’s brass thimble. Then she clips on the soft fur-covered handle and hangs the chain of polished silver beads across the front. This is the step her thumb can’t do any more.

6. Three colours, one notebook

Every bag comes in one of three colours, all from the deer at the bottom of the garden: Fawn, the honey colour of a newborn in June; Chestnut, the deep russet of the doe herself; and Frost Grey, the coat the fallow deer wear in January. Each bag measures about 26 by 18 centimetres, just right for a phone, keys, a lipstick and a slim purse. And each one gets a line in the exercise book Avril has kept since 1977. The last batch is #3,084 to #3,140. There will be no #3,141.

A Cup of Tea on the Back Step

The morning she finished bag #3,140, the very last one, Avril made a pot of tea, put on her old waxed jacket and sat on the back step for a long time, looking down the garden to the trees.

Imogen had driven up for the weekend. “I asked her if she was sad,” Imogen says. “She just said, ‘That bracken will have a fawn in it again in June, and I won’t have to make a single thing to enjoy it.’ Then she finished her tea and went in and started wrapping.”

The paper pattern will stay on the wall. Avril has told Imogen it’s the one thing in the cottage she wants framed.

The Thumb on Her Right Hand

Her GP in Lydney calls it osteoarthritis at the base of the thumb. Avril calls it “the hinge”. It’s the small joint where the thumb meets the wrist, the one that does the pinching and the pushing.

She can still drive to Coleford. She can still peg out the washing and run a straight seam on the Singer. What she can’t do is close her fingers round a heavy needle and drive it through the backing of the fur, again and again, for the rings and the lining. That pinch is exactly what every one of her bags needs.

It started on a Tuesday in March 2025, on bag #3,051. The needle stopped halfway through the backing and wouldn’t go any further. She pushed again. Her thumb wouldn’t. She put on her mother’s thimble and tried once more, set the bag down on the windowsill and went to put the kettle on. She didn’t tell Imogen until Easter.

For a year and a half she kept going anyway, slower than ever, resting her hand between rings. The very last one, bag #3,140, took her almost a fortnight. That was when she knew.

She could have bought rivets. She could have glued the rings on, the way the cheap bags in the shops do. She won’t.

“If I can’t set the rings myself, it isn’t my bag any more. It’s just a bag.”

So the 57 on the kitchen table are all there is. All sewn. All combed out. All finished by her own hand, before the hinge gave up.

Half the Fair Price, Online for the First and Last Time

At the village hall, Avril’s bags sold for £79, and the women who knew her queued before the doors opened. She has never sold one online. Not once in 49 years.

This time she has asked Imogen to put them online at £39. The cottage has been paid off for decades. Her pension covers the shopping and the oil for the Rayburn. Imogen runs the orders from her flat for nothing. The money isn’t what this is about.

“I want them out of this kitchen and on somebody’s arm,” Avril says. “At the carol service. In the queue at the post office. At a grandchild’s nativity play, with the programme stuffed inside. Not in a wardrobe with the tags still on. My mother sewed those muffs so women could walk home from chapel warm. These were always meant to be used.”

That’s why the price is low. It’s meant to find the women who will actually carry one, through this Christmas and the winters after it, not the ones who buy something to put away. If one of Avril’s last bags comes back from a Christmas do with a bit of frost on the fur and a story attached, she’d call that a good ending.

What Three Women Said After a Winter With One

Three Questions Imogen Gets Most Often

Where can I buy one of Avril’s bags?

Only through this page. Imogen handles every order herself through County Craft, a small online shop that works with makers who still do things by hand. Avril’s bags are not sold on Amazon, eBay or any other marketplace. Anything you see there called a “fawn fur bag” has nothing to do with her.

How many are left, and will it arrive before Christmas?

57 bags were left when this article was published, numbered #3,084 to #3,140, in Fawn, Chestnut and Frost Grey. The sale runs until 20 December or until the last one has gone, whichever comes first. Orders are dispatched within 1–2 working days, so there is time for Christmas.

What if it isn’t right for me?

Then you send it back. Every bag comes with a 90-day money-back guarantee. Email Imogen at info@countycraftco.com and she will sort it out.

One More Look at What Owners Say

Note: This article is a sponsored editorial and contains advertising. The product featured was carefully selected. Prices may vary depending on availability. The story is based on real events; some details have been condensed for editorial clarity.