However, as Lesley Jackson notes: "The reality of working in a factory was an eye-opener for Day, who, with her growing taste for modern design, found it hard to adapt to the conservative style of the company.

Following their marriage on 5 September 1942, the couple set up home at 33 Markham Square in Chelsea, London, furnishing their flat with Lucienne's hand-printed textiles and Robin's hand-made furniture.

[6] The Festival of Britain, a landmark exhibition held on London's South Bank in 1951, proved a decisive turning point in Lucienne Day's career.

Hand screen printed on linen in lemon yellow, orangey-red and black on an olive-coloured ground, Calyx was a large-scale abstract pattern composed of cup-shaped motifs connected by spindly lines, which conjured up the aesthetic of modern painters and sculptors, such as Alexander Calder and Paul Klee.

Although she designed for other firms as well during this period, her textiles for Heal's form the core of her creative opus and include a string of patterns which typify the forward-looking post-war era, such as Dandelion Clocks (1953), Spectators (1953), Graphica (1953), Ticker Tape (1953), Trio (1954), Herb Antony (1956) and Script (1956).

[6] As well as pure abstracts, she often created stylised organic patterns incorporating motifs such as skeletal leaves, spindly stems, feathery seed heads and butterflies.

[3]: 78–88 Later in the decade, responding to new artistic trends such as abstract expressionism and the architectural fashion for floor-to-ceiling picture windows, Lucienne's designs for Heal's became more overtly painterly and much larger in scale.

Dramatic full-width patterns, such as Sequoia (1959) and Larch (1961), both featuring trees, and rugged textural abstracts such as Ducatoon (1959) and Cadenza (1961), reflect a significant evolution in style.

As well as crisp flat florals, such as High Noon (1965), Pennycress (1966) and Poinsettia (1966), redolent of Flower Power, she developed a series of striking geometrics, including Apex (1967), Causeway (1968) and Sunrise (1969), which evoke parallels with Op Art.

Lucienne's partnership with the German company Rasch, who promoted her wallpapers as part of their international artists' range, gave her access to a European audience.

Printed in just one or two colours with a deliberately restricted palette, her wallpaper designs were quieter and more recessive than her textiles, with smaller motifs and simpler compositions.

As colour consultant to Wilton Royal, Lucienne selected the colourways for their Architects Range and in 1964 produced her own collection of bold geometric designs.

Vibrantly coloured, these hangings – some abstract, others with stylised motifs such as signs of the zodiac – were exhibited during the 1980s and 1990s at venues such as the National Theatre in London and the Röhsska Museum in Gothenburg.

Although the silk mosaic format was more restrictive than her earlier textile patterns, Lucienne relished the challenge of working within this self-imposed discipline, experimenting freely with the interplay of colour.

Through commissions for specific interiors, such as Aspects of the Sun, a large composite hanging created in 1990 for the new John Lewis store at Kingston, she was able to engage with architecture more directly and ambitiously than ever before.

Throughout her career, Lucienne Day won many awards, including a Gold Medal for Calyx at the Milan Triennale in 1951 and a Citation of Merit from the American Institute of Decorators in 1952.

Lucienne Day's early textiles were inspired by her love of modern art, especially the abstract paintings of Paul Klee and Joan Miró.

"[10] However, although abstraction was the dominant idiom in her work, Lucienne also perpetuated the English tradition of patterns based on plant forms, often incorporating stylised motifs derived from nature, such as leaves, flowers, twigs and seedpods.

After dabbling in painterly, textural abstraction during the early 1960s, she experimented with hard-edged, multi-layered geometric designs composed of squares, circles, diamonds and stripes during the mid to late 1960s.

Lucienne Day believed that good design should be affordable and in 2003, she told The Scotsman newspaper that she had been "very interested in modern painting although I didn't want to be a painter.

"[12] Lucienne Day's post-war achievements were first brought to attention in a major international exhibition called The New Look: Design in the Fifties at Manchester City Art Gallery in 1991.

[13] A wide-ranging solo exhibition was held at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester in 1993, curated by Dr Jennifer Harris, author of the accompanying monograph Lucienne Day: A Career in Design.