I’ve been working on a giant hand-made fabric book for Kensington Palace. It’s for the outreach team who go storytelling in nurseries, schools and libraries, and is a story about the Palace’s various princesses over the years encountering a plague of rats and dealing with it in their own individual ways.

To make the book, I used pen and ink and digital collage to create the images, then printed them onto iron-on fabric transfer paper (kept forgetting to ‘flip’ first, so many sheets went in the bin), then ironed the pictures onto heavy cotton canvas ‘pages’. I added bits of stitching here and there, also opening cupboard doors and sequins in places, and 3-d felt leaves. Then I bound the book by stitching the many layers together (very sore fingers) and adding a contrasting spine with blanket stitch.

I also made a hand-puppet to go with the book – it’s the young rat-catcher who saves the day, and the storyteller uses him to go through all the events of the narrative.