Craftsmen have always had great fun exercising their skills in depicting all sorts of creatures in the flower garden. Illuminated manuscripts cram their jewel bright borders with small mammals, birds, butterflies, bees and refined creepy crawlies, while books like the Macclesfield Psalter have margins and borders jostling with the most humorous and cartoon-like animals, both […]

There’s something glorious about Elizabethan jackets with their profligacy of flowers and richness of colour through which rambling golden whirls of curlicues wander. I just had to make one. With all the enthusiasm of an 18 year-old whose A-levels were over and for whom an extended summer yawned empty until university in October, I began […]