Sheila Paine was born on 29 September 1929 in Balham to Barbara Sykes and the quantity surveyor Edgar Thorpe.

She then broke off her education, travelling to South Africa to work as a translator and meeting a mining engineer, Leslie Paine.

Remaking her life, Sheila Paine began to travel to "the remotest of places"[1] such as the Hindu Kush, the Karakoram Mountains, Eritrea, Somalia, Iran, or Siberia.

She habitually travelled with 5 kilograms of baggage and a bottle of vodka; to save weight, she went so far as to cut the handles of her toothbrushes in half.

It was decorated with embroidered suns, coins, broken zip-fasteners, a triangular amulet of pieces of shell and beads, and no fewer than 647 triangles of cloth sewn on to the skirt's frill.

[4] Many of her journeys were in search of the "linen goddess", a female figure who appears in embroidered textiles from the Greek islands to the Himalayas.