"Oh my god, I completely forgot" screams Laura when I call to say I am outside her studio at the appointed hour. Tucked away in a canalside cul-de-sac off City Road, Laura's workspace is industrial and of course, today's the day they are knocking down and rebuilding her back wall. "You must edit out my fucking swearing," she says as I switch on the tape recorder. "I've got Tourettes."

You may know Laura as the 'graffiti embroiderer' whose work appeared in collections by Fee Doran (aka Mrs Jones), Giles Deacon and Luella Bartley (that infamous jacket). Despite her love of London - she's was hanging out in Hoxton long before the fashion tourists descended - Laura hails from Edinburgh. "I speak to someone from home at least once a day," she confesses whilst showing me her Scottish souvenirs and laughing at herself: "I know it's ridiculous - I love Edinburgh so much I live in London!"

"I must admit I spent more time pissing it up than I did actually embroidering at that point."

Get one thing straight. Lees is not a fashion designer, "I would never call myself a fashion designer," instead she sees herself as an artist, embroiderer and loom lover, working on the fringes of fashion - she chooses not to stage shows during London Fashion Week and showed her 'Gone To The Dogs' and 'Gone To The Pub' collections at the Dragon Bar in east London. This year, Laura has developed two collections, both focusing on dark and disturbing subjects - s/s is all about The Western Day of The Dead and a/w explores Lees' obsession with cult horror flick, The Wicker Man. For months, she's been stitching away night and day on a gobsmacking variety of handcrafted creations for the show including leather bunting and flamboyant tassles (to decorate columns at the venue), creepy headdresses and a tryptic of Las Vegas (where she married fellow Edinburgh-London exile, George earlier this year).

After leaving school at 17, Laura did an interior design course, "which I didn't enjoy" and then spent some time working in bars. She signed up to a degree at Dundee College of Art and Design in Constructed Textiles by mistake. "I read the prospectus wrong," she explains. "I thought Constructed Textiles would be some big Fine Art sculptural thing and then I got there and it was knitting, weaving and tapestry."

Tapestry is still her "main passion, but I've not really been able to practice tapestry since I moved down to London." Instead, over the last eight years, Lees has carved out a unique place for herself straddling both art and fashion worlds. She tells it like this:

"So, the boyfriend at the time was living in London, right in Shoreditch - this was like 8 years ago. I was coming down and meeting Fee [Doran] and Giles [Deacon] and all these people 'cos we were all in the same social/ drinking scene. When I came down here because i didn't have a studio or a tapestry loom to actually do it, I sort of went back to doing wee bits of embroidery here and there. Fee and Giles were like, "Oh we need a wee bit of embroidery' and I did a bit for them and I showed them what I was working on. It was very conducive to the whole sort of graffiti - applying it in an arts and crafts manner - it was becoming a fashion, an iconographic thing."

"I'd been embroidering for years but it was always freehand embroidery. If I ripped my jacket I would sew it up but make a feature of the stitches.. I'd be doing things like, someone had a kid so I would embroider a bib for them. It was just wee silly things."

"It was a really nice atmosphere, everyone was skint."

Back then, Laura's studio was above the Red Lion, a pub she immortalised as a leather painting for her Gone To The Pub collection/exhibition, which she paid for by working sessions behind the bar. "Hoxton was such a hub of creativity. I'm not saying, 'in the good old days when Hoxton was Hoxton' cos it was crap, you had to walk two miles for a pint of milk - but there was a really good scene. I must admit I spent more time pissing it up than I did actually embroidering at that point."

Laura survived by signing on and doing the odd cash job, one of which is a true claim to fame."I retiled the toilets at the 333" she beams. "I had to cover up a multitude of sins because it used to be the LA [a popular gay club]. I have always been really into music, fashion, film, art. - and how did you finance your social life? Well, you went to private views. It was a really nice atmosphere, everyone was skint."

Punctuating her passionate drinking and socialising with needlecraft, Laura developed a 'subversive stitch' mantle and much of her work was based on stitching individual words, some of which were visible and meaningful and some others based on "drunken haverings from nightclubs - it was just daft little eejit things I'd heard in nightclubs, you know the things you hear when you are out and about and it made me and giggle and I would find myself sewing it the next day."

She doesn't take the 'subversive stitch' label seriously, but her relationship with needle and thread is other-worldy. There is nothing this woman won't recycle for her work - she stitches surrounded by boxes of fabric scraps, buttons, ribbons, patches and very thin strips of leather which will eventually all get made into something.

Laura has only recently turned her talents into regular wages for herself and others. After the Red Lion, she moved into a bigger space, stopped claiming benefits, spilt up with the boyfriend and said to herself "right you bugger, you've got to start making money." But she shared the studio with a "bunch of airy fairy dippy buggers in this co-op - they had an amazing space and they just used it for parties."

So Laura made a point of working "hell for leather. Then I started doing some jackets for Luella Bartley and i remember being at The Bricklayers [Arms] and wearing this beautiful jacket I'd made and standing in front of Katie Grand making a point of 'look at this..'".

"That's how I got a lot of working going out and about, speaking to lots of people wearing stuff I'd embroidered. I've always been into my fashion but I am not a fashion designer by any means and I will never ever call myself a fashion designer - I am an embroiderer, a textile artist, do you know what I mean?"

Although LL's embroidered jackets and other pieces were attracting a lot of press attention, her work went mainly uncredited. Another studio move meant committing a chunk of cash to the business and around this time Laura ended-up doing commissions just for the wedge. "I was doing really dodgy stuff like for Hear'say and shite like that.. I was putting on a subversive message - underneath every flower or whatever I had to sew on I was writing 'you are total shite'. Really naff commissions and then handing it to stylists and saying 'OK can I just stipulate one thing - make sure I am NOT credited here!"

After hooking up with Justin Piggot from The Dragon Bar, Laura staged Gone To The Dogs - an exhibition which allowed her to focus for the first time on showing her leather appliqué paintings. "It was about putting that stuff back onto the walls. Big leather applique paintings. It was very graphic, 2D, simple shapes, instant impact and then mixed with detailed things and tapestry."

"You know they'd embroider secret messages in garments."

With support from Justin and his girlfriend, Laura staged an amazing show which resulted in her signing up with legendary press officer, Mandi Lennard. "She's astonishing, really, really, amazing and that's what definitely stepped everything up again. She really believed in the work and that was brilliant. She said, 'Right you should do a fashion collection alongside it.' Mandi was really good at encouraging me - I made these lovely little handkerchiefs with Snotty Slut on them and she said it was a great thing to give to people."

After spending much of the next year honing her leather applique and embroidery skills, Laura staged her next show, Gone To The Pub, which featured dramatic leather paintings of beloved east London pubs and enormous leather punchbags and a ready-to-wear clothing collection including men's sweatshirts which looked like they'd been put on inside out. "I didn't think my fashion side of it was terribly strong," she admits, but the artwork I was really pleased with."

The dramatic impact of her work on walls - especially pieces like The Red Lion which features hundreds of bricks all individually handstitched - inspired Lees to focus further on the developing art pieces. But she was still she says, "rubbish at selling. People would ask if they could buy something and I didn't know what to say.. now I put the prices on!."

She continued to stitch in her studio surviving on commissions and one-offs until one day another bill she couldn't pay arrived and she decided to jack it all in and become a landscape gardener. "Then Terence from Two Agency phoned me up.. they wanted to put my work into production.. that was it, the Laura Lees label was born."

The next big break came when Selfridges in London agreed to stock her collections ("Kit has been so amazing") and Laura's extravagant handcrafted installations for the shop, as well as her clothes, won her recognition from a whole new fan base.

"Embroidery is a very instant vehicle to get your work out on...I was always much more competent at using a needle and thread as my pen and paper as opposed to sitting down drawing .. I used to always do writing and then it became a signature this handwriting that I did. You couldn't really make it out .. I did loads of it at college .. it became about this written word that no one knew the meaning of apart from me, and then you go back to the old Designer Guilds and the old traditions of embroidery where it was about the suppression of women and all that crap. You know they'd embroider secret messages in garments."

In March, Laura married George Demure in Las Vegas. He's a man who wears fine brogue boots and is good at washing clothes. While George is working on a career in music, his missus says he's "the gayest straight man I have ever married." These newly weds are well in love and it's no wonder that on the eve of her next double collection show, the woman is beaming with creative confidence. Another big change has been working with Donna Kernan, a designer who is overseeing Laura's womenswear collections. "It is amazing - I am now in the situation where I have people to help me create my vision."

While 2004's spring collection paid homage to pub games, Laura is experimenting with folksy frocks and cor blimey headdresses, juxtaposing pretty shapes with sinister symbols of witchcraft. As a bit of a Tom-boy herself, Laura still struggles with a really feminine wardrobe: "I have always said that 'if I was a girl I'd wear dresses' but I feel very vulnerable in one. When I wear a dress people say I look like a trannie..."

The pished-up, shook-up days when hung-over the sewing machine Laura stitched across her entire hand, have pretty much been replaced with manic periods of intensive work ("I have a competitive streak in me and when I am working on a one-off piece, I give everything I can to it") and the odd bender. Laura has already handstitched her homepage, but for the moment it's being kept in a drawer in her studio until she can get round to organising her website. In the meantime, watch this space and we'll keep you updated on the haverings and artistic happenings in the world of Laura Lees.

[For information on Laura Lees collections, art pieces and commissions contact Michael at Blow: or 020 7436 9449]