In a dusty, damp Victorian pub off an East London thoroughfare fringed with fried-chicken joints and kebab houses, a group of fashionable young women make their way past the bar weighed down with fabric samples and cake stands piled high with home-made goodies.

Negotiating a narrow set of stairs they emerge into a back room that looks like a burlesque dressing room — layers of antique wallpaper curl off the walls and assorted ornate lamps balance precariously between the swaths of patterned fabrics. As the girls perch on chipped chairs, a dainty dog emerges from the fabric piles with a cupcake on its nose and has to be rescued from the larger, fiercer pub cat.

Eventually Jazz Mellor, the daughter of the late Clash frontman Joe Strummer, who is an event organiser and writer, hushes the crowd. “Welcome to the Shoreditch Sisters branch of the Women’s Institute,” she says with a smile.

This is a Women’s Institute group like no other. They have an average age of about 26, an ice-cold cool factor, and meet each month to tackle subjects ranging from conspiracy theories to organic farming. This month it’s feminist quilt-making.

Janice Gunner, former president of the Quilting Guild, gives an introductory talk. Techniques and styles — hand-stitched, print-blocks, sewing-machined, embroidered, indigo-dyed, found fabrics — trip off her tongue. “I’ve only got a sewing kit freebie from a hotel,” worries Emily, 27.

The girls choose fabric from the piles, and break off into groups, sewing and nibbling cakes. Janice passes samples around. As well as more traditional patchwork, there’s a Cézanne-style landscape in burnt ambers and greens and a vast hanging made in collaboration with the African Families Foundation incorporating the text from the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833.

Gunner says: “Needlework has often been political — think of the suffragettes’ banners. And it has always been a form of liberation for women, a way for them to earn money and gain independence.

“I’ve been doing needlework since I was 5,”she says, while helping me to choose a background fabric, another for patchwork and a thread to embroider my name. “My mother taught me. You need to be taught the basics, the rules of the game, and then you can take off and be inventive yourself.”

I wasn’t taught the basics. I’ve bought a sewing kit for £1 in a local corner shop. I can’t thread the needle. No, I don’t know what cable stitching is. “We’re the first generation not to learn these skills from our mothers,” Jazz says. “Which was fair enough. Our mothers needed to discard those values at the time, but when I started Viva Cake — a retro club night — I realised that loads of women of my age were really interested in these crafts.”

Once I get the hang of cable stitching, the rhythm is strangely therapeutic. And being in an all-female environment is refreshing. Perhaps because we’re all learning a skill, a practical, cheery atmosphere pervades. We don’t get far with our patches, but we are quicker to develop into a self-mockingly kitsch sisterhood.

At 10pm Elnaz Niknani, a designer of jewelled leggings, whoops with joy as she shows Janice her work — a giant cupcake crowned with a cherry and riding a sea in front of a beachhut which, it turns out, is actually “the house of love, because that’s what we are. A house of love”.

The Shoreditch Sisters meet on the last Tuesday of every month. For more information, go to www.myspace.com/shoreditchsisterswi

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