ME AND MY JOB: Catherine Foley hears from award-winning fashion designer Eileen Galvin

The Kitchen table is laden with designs and sketches. Eileen Galvin, who recently picked the Budweiser Young Designer Award 2002, is up to her eyes in pins, needles, fabrics, threads, trimmings, pencils, paper, measuring tapes, metre sticks, scissors, patterns, set squares and notebooks - with two types of sewing machines taking up space as well.

She lies awake at night, her mind teeming with ideas for her designs. She writes everything down. Her three winning outfits in the fashion competition, which was held at the RDS recently, were based on water-skiing and snow-boarding ideas, she says. "My husband is a water-ski instructor. Boats leave out this crest of foam like two big waves in a V. The coat's hood ties with a hook and goes down in a V.

"It ties in with snowboarding. They all wear the same kind of look. The shapes, colours and trails that the snowboarders leave behind, that's where my idea came from." Her win on the night was the unanimous vote of the judges.

Her home in Lower Dripsey, near Blarney in Co Cork, is where she works, while she minds her three young boys. "I've just started," she says. "Every week I'd have something to do for someone. I'm looking for somewhere suitable where I can do consultations."

As well as working on new designs and making clothes for her clients, she also attends the Mallow College of Design and Tailoring, where she is currently studying for a two-year City and Guilds' certificate in fashion design, which she will complete next year.

"I started this two years ago. I love it. I didn't expect any of this to happen to me for another couple of years. I've advanced so far into it. I can't wait to do more of it. I crave more hours in the day," she says.

Galvin put a little sign up in a local shop saying she would make curtains, trousers, dresses and do other small dress-making jobs. Her work load has continued to grow as she continues to learn at the college in Mallow.

"It's very exciting," she says. "I'm hoping in the long run either to have my own design shop or design a line for a department store. That's what I'd love."

Galvin, who went to St Aloysius Secondary School in Cork, sat her Leaving Cert in 1990 and "hadn't a notion what I was going to do with my life". She learned to draft patterns, to sew and to make a skirt, a blouse, a jacket and trousers.

She trained as a nurse and later as a midwife, but the day she went to meet the class at the Mallow College of Design and Tailoring to begin part-time sewing classes was the turning point.

The first day, she says, "was fabulous. I went in and saw a lot of women standing around a dummy arguing about a pattern that wouldn't work."

She's never looked back.