One for the boys

It's my view that one of the few drawbacks of decorative painting and folk art is that most of the designs available are rather girly.

Theoretically, painting on useful objects lets you share the final results to family and friends - you have to really or you build up a huge collection of stuff under your bed.

However, when your family consists of a father, husband, two sons, three brothers, four nephews - and the one sister-in-law - endless flowery items just don't cut the mustard.

So I was very pleased when we started this project in my class. It's a wooden tray with a very liberal interpretation of Mont Saint Michel. The original design was by Linda Lock, adapted by my teacher Maggie Curtis, and adapted again by me to fit the space.