Judith Healy is using her late mother's 1950s fashion designs as inspiration for a range of handbags.

She tells the column of her delight in making use of the legacy.

SIMPLY Dorrie handbags are the result of a mother/daughter partnership with a difference. Judith Healy's mother Dorrie had always wanted to be a fashion designer, had studied design at Middlesbrough's Constantine College in the 1950s and amassed a great portfolio of work.

Unfortunately, her parents refused to let her continue her studies in London and she worked in local schools until her early death when daughter Judith was only 16.

But Judith kept all her mother's designs, treasuring the battered portfolio and taking it with her in all her moves, and now, over 25 years later, has used them as the inspiration for a range of handbags.

"I'm so excited about launching mum's designs because I know how delighted she would have been," says Judith, who runs a marketing company in Middlesbrough.

"She never had the chance to develop her full potential and was dogged with ill health all her short life, but she was always designing and making beautiful clothes - which was brilliant for me when I was a teenager. And just before she died, she had started studying millinery. She kept that interest in fashion right up to the end."

Judith decided to use the designs for handbags "because bags are my real self indulgence". And the bags echo the Fifties shapes and themes. "My mother had done lots of designs for dresses and evening dresses. They are unusual and individual, yet so typical of the era. I had to learn a lot about handbags very quickly, especially the technicalities - zips, fasteners, even the right sort of glue. We worked through an awful lot of samples."

Judith, a single parent to her eight-year-old son, Dale, has teamed up with Liz Cuerden of Linens Select in Huddersfield and hopes to use more of her mother's designs on fabrics and soft furnishings. She hopes this could be the beginning of a whole new venture.

"Of course Dale never knew his grandma, but this is a lovely legacy. I just wish she was here to see people's reaction to her designs."

* Simply Dorrie Handbags, £95, are currently available from Howes Collection, Stokesley.