“The state’s taking Dad’s shop to widen the highway. These are the last bags I’ll ever sew in it.” – Why a 72-year-old Victorian quilter is selling her last sewing duffles at a special price

The envelope came in August, at the tail end of winter – the thick kind with the state government crest in the corner. Inside were a map, a valuation and one sentence Glenice Whitbread has read more times than she’d like to admit: the land will be compulsorily acquired for the highway duplication, and the building will be removed.

The shop in question is a narrow weatherboard building with a corrugated-iron verandah on the highway out of Castlemaine, 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 out the front is being doubled to four lanes. On the engineers’ drawing, the new kerb runs straight through the middle of the front counter.

“They were decent about it, fair enough,” Glenice says. “A young bloke came out with a clipboard and apologised twice. But a highway’s a highway. Dad’s shop is in the way of it, and that’s the end of the story.”

The back room behind the counter

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

Glenice sits at a black Singer with gold decals, a half-finished duffle panel under the needle. A pedestal fan ticks round in the corner. A little radio on the windowsill is tuned to the local ABC station, turned down low.

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

She doesn’t sound bitter. Mostly she sounds practical. “The road needs doing. I sit in that traffic like everyone else. I just wish they’d found the three and a half metres somewhere else.”

37 years, about 3,800 bags, one workbench

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

The duffle came much later. In 1989 a friend from her CWA craft group, Nola, complained that she had no decent way to carry her blocks, her thread and her scissors to the big quilt and craft show in Bendigo. Glenice 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 cotton reels, a tomato pincushion and a tape measure.

Nola carried it to the show. By Sunday arvo, six women had asked where she got it.

In the 37 years since, Glenice 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’s not my bag any more. It’s somebody else’s bag with my name on it.”

Why one of Glenice’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 around every edge.

Every duffle carries the same scene: the little sewing machine in the middle, cotton reels 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,” Glenice 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 Glenice 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, cotton reels, pincushion, scissors and buttons, each cut from fabric and sewn on individually – some with a raised, three-dimensional edge.
• Premium cotton over polyester batting. 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 Glenice 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 craft-group nights and a few dozen quilting retreats.

“A lady from Mildura brought hers back in last autumn,” she says. “She bought it in 2006. The handles were worn soft and one corner had faded where it sat in the back window of her ute. She didn’t want it fixed. She wanted a second one, the same, for her daughter, who’d just started quilting. That’s the best thing anyone can tell me.”

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

It’s going in the first box she packs.

What the road is actually taking

Glenice 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 1977. The state 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 over 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 out the back – the last of the stock she always sews ahead for the autumn quilt show. Whatever hasn’t found a home by 31 December has nowhere to go.

Why she’d rather let them go for A$89

So Glenice has made a decision. Instead of A$179, the last duffles are A$89 each – less than half what she has charged for years.

“I’m not going to haggle with the state, 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 storage shed out on the Calder Freeway. I want every one of them on somebody’s arm, off to a craft group or a retreat or the grandkids’ place. They can have the building. They’re not getting my bags.”

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

What women who carry one say

Where to get one before they’re gone

Glenice’s duffles are sold in one place only: Backroad Goods, the small online shop her grandson Brodie (26) runs for her.

“Brodie does all the computer side,” Glenice says. “I can thread a needle in the dark, but don’t ask me to build a website. Right now he’s mostly taping up boxes. We want every one of them gone before the dozers turn up.”

One word of warning: as the bag has become better known, cheap printed copies have started popping up on the big online marketplaces. In a listing photo they look close. In your hands they are a flat printed picture on thin fabric. The originals from Glenice’s bench are only available through Backroad Goods – 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 A$89 price and the deadline, the last duffles are going faster than Glenice and Brodie 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 craft group, a retreat or to see the grandkids, you take a little piece of a Castlemaine 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 bin.

Thank you, Glenice. 🧵🌹

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