My mother-in-law, Sheila Paine, who has died aged 92, was an authority on tribal embroideries. During her eventful life she journeyed alone to some of the remotest parts of the world, in search of the origin of textile patterns and traditions, about which she wrote a series of acclaimed books.
Sheila was born in Balham, south London, to Barbara (nee Sykes), a housewife-secretary, and Edgar Thorpe, a quantity surveyor for London Transport. She attended Nonsuch grammar school and the French Lycée, in London, followed by Hammersmith College of Art, where she did a foundation course.
On a ship sailing to South Africa in 1951, on her way to work in the German-speaking law courts in Windhoek, Namibia, as a translator, she met Leslie Paine. They married two years later, then returned to the UK and went on to have four children. The family lived in Cheshire and Surbiton before buying a plot and building a house in Blewbury, Oxfordshire. Desperate to obtain the education she had missed in travelling to Africa, Sheila enrolled at Oxford Polytechnic in the late 1960s and later taught modern languages there.
The shocking death of Leslie, in the Turkish Airlines plane crash outside Paris on 3 March 1974, changed things for ever. Sheila had always had an eye for textiles, and had begun to collect English samplers, which adorned the walls of Morters, the family home in Blewbury.
But after Leslie’s death she would set off to the remotest of places with just her small bag, limited to 6kg (including the ever-present bottle of vodka); toothbrushes were cut in half to save weight. Then she would be gone, to the Hindu Kush and Karakoram Mountains, the depths of Siberia, Africa and Central Asia. Always alone, always completely focused. On her return, the bag would have expanded to accommodate the treasured textiles she had found, each carefully photographed, tagged, and forensically examined and described.
Sheila’s remarkable journeys resulted in a series of books describing her search for an embroidered motif that she described as the “linen goddess” – a representation of a female figure that can be found from high in the Himalayas to the Greek islands. Her trilogy – The Afghan Amulet (1994), The Golden Horde (1997) and The Linen Goddess (2003) – has become a classic of travel writing.
More books followed, including two for the British Museum on the textiles of Pakistan and India, a world encyclopedia of embroidered textiles and the acclaimed Amulets: A World of Secret Powers, Charms and Magic (2004). In 2017 the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford published Embroidered Visions. The photographs themselves were exhibited in a gallery at the museum.
Sheila stopped travelling when she reached 80, after fracturing her back. Later, and much to her disappointment, she put her remarkable collection of textiles up for auction when no institution could be found to buy it.
She is survived by her children, Denzil, Rosamund, Morwenna and Imogen, six grandchildren and her brother, David.
