Book excerpt: Arts and Crafts artist-designers changed the lives of Scots. Through the furnishing of public buildings, exhibitions, church craft and home design, they aimed to restore beauty to everyday experience. They worked in diverse fields such as furniture, textiles, jewellery and metalwork, glass, ceramics, mural decoration and architectural design and crafts. Theirs is a narrative of close networks of families and friends, men and women, designers and industrialists dedicated to the rights of the individual and to the proper place of art within modern society. It is a remarkable and often inspiring story of ideals, commitment - and imagination. Scottish Arts and Crafts brought together British design practice with the romance of tradition. This book for the first time provides a national context for the work of Margaret Macdonald and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Robert Lorimer, Phoebe Anna Traquair, and many new names that emerge from the shadows.