I went to meet India and Amy on a typically grey Sunday in Michaelmas. The clocks had turned back and at 4pm it was dark. But, bouncingly coming to meet me at the entrance to Magdalene Cripps Court in their socks, the pair certainly injected some sunshine into an otherwise dreary evening.

“Please don’t just describe us as two friends making art”, they ask me as we climb up the stairs to India’s bedroom. The corridor is fuchsia pink and inside a regimentally white room is decorated with piles of art books and a zebra-print throw.

History of Art students at Magdalene who both decided against art school, they bonded over a shared love for arts and crafts, spending free evenings painting and sewing in each other’s bedrooms.

“People can be quite dismissive of what we do in Cambridge – they don’t really get it. Last year we were living in a house with three boys. They were really into their DJ-ing. We would just sit there sewing like grannies”.

Their hobby turned into a business when they started decorating denim pieces for friends with fabric paint, chalk and embroidery with Keith Haring-inspired shapes and Matisse-like outlines of the female body. ‘Aydua’, the name under which they work, is India’s eccentric distant cousin and also her middle name.

Fittingly then, their style is irreverent and iconographic while also unintimidating and utterly current. Although every other item in Topshop now seems to involve Gucci-imitation embroidery, India and Amy’s penchant for textiles was ahead of the curve: “When we started it just wasn’t a thing… Not that we like set the trend or anything!” Amy tells me, “we just saw denim as a material to work with – it wasn’t fashion or anything, just wearable art”, adds India.

Sadly, the time-consuming nature of the denim projects meant that, now in their finals, they are now focusing on painting, drawing and collage. They no longer live together and so felt tips are the easiest thing to ferry to and fro. At the moment they’re creating soft, hanging sculptures in strange ball shapes: “They’re tactile and smelly, we dyed them with onions” to display at their friend’s exhibition.

Aydua has become a more general outlet for their art: “At Cambridge it can be hard to do anything creative outside of your degree. There’s life drawing and set and costume design, but we wanted to be creative with no means to an end. Just for the sake of it”, Amy explains, “we do it together and by giving it a name it motivates us. It makes it a thing and gives us a coherent vision.”

They’re also currently working on a tapestry: “We’ve each got a piece and we’ll swap it around. We sew about anything to do with life. It seems really banal but when we look back at it at the end it will be this massive, visual diary entry”.

I’m starting to think that maybe all of us should dig out the felt tips and Caran d’Ache crayons. Whereas a diary can turn into a laborious writing exercise, sewing and art is wonderfully mindful and meditative: the perfect antidote to Cambridge academia: “You catch yourself thinking about the most mundane rubbish”, India tells me.

Their inspirations include Niki de Saint Phalle, Sonia Delaunay and the German Expressionists. However, they cite Instagram as one of their biggest idea sources: “There are lots of young artists that we follow. It’s huge.” Although it’s admittedly “bad for museum culture, as it makes people lazy and less likely to go and see the real thing”, India says it’s also a wonderful cyber network where a new generation of artists, creating ‘bedroom art’ can network and share ideas.

A trip onto the @aydua_art Instagram page proves just as much: tender and joyful self-portraits, inspirations and collages, all instantly accessible to an infinitely large audience.

Social media aside, Aydua is also testament to a throwback arts and crafts revival, whereby knitting, sewing and colouring have come firmly into the mainstream. We chat about how our mothers, in a time gone by, would have made their own clothes: “What ever happened all that – like making your own curtains?!”

Friendship comes first for Aydua. You can instantly tell that they work well as a pair, twinning clothes (“We both have the same matching sparkly jumper”) and sharing that uniquely female best, best friend kind of bond that is also the key to their creative success.

“We draw on the sheet of paper at the same time and we turn it around. It just feels really easy. We’ve built this idea together of what we are. We study the same subject so we have ideas about what we’ve been looking at all day.”

“In the future we’d quite like to work together and make it a thing, something textile-y or furniture-y. We’d like to travel together and learn traditional methods, create big wall hangings, murals and tapestries – sculptures too. But the easiest thing right now is just to get some felt tips”