Janice trained as a primary school teacher and taught in primary schools in the suburbs of Melbourne for ten years, before going to live in South East Asia, firstly Singapore and later Jakarta, Indonesia, with her husband, Rudi, and two children, Rudolph and Gretel. Whilst in Asia, she studied numerous different crafts and developed a love for traditional textiles. Rudi travelled extensively and rarely arrived home without an exotic traditional textile from some little known place in South East Asia.

Janice has always been interested in textiles and learnt "fancy work", dressmaking and knitting from her mother when she was very young. From there, she branched out and experimented with different fabric crafts – hand and machine embroidery as well as knitting, crocheting, spinning and weaving. As a result of her experiences in South East Asia, fashion designing, hand and machine piecing, hand and machine quilting, batik and hand dyeing were added to her skills.

Australian Fauna & Flora are unique to Australia.

Janice lives about 50 kilometres from the heart of Melbourne, in the Long Forest, a unique area in the State of Victoria, Australia, on a five-acre property, which has "Land for Wildlife". The land is natural bush and is a significant Flora area. Black Wallabies and Koalas sometimes visit. In summer, the reptiles – lizards and the occasional snake come out to sun themselves and an abundance of birds are around each day.

The bush is tall dominated by Grey Box Eucalypt trees (E.microcarpa). A variety of acacias, native grasses and minute native orchids, which bloom in Spring are in the understorey. The Leopard Orchid is about 15 mm. From late winter to early summer, the golden blooms of the wattles (acacias) can be seen throughout Australia.

Detail of waterlilies and a lizard in the jungle. The lizard is an appliqué gecko and the waterlilies are the machine embroidered filled waterlily from the Heitree Design Flora CD which has machine embroidered flowers in outline as well as filled versions. The CD also has machine quilting patterns for the Flora Collection. The filled Birdwing Butterfly hovers over the waterlily and an outline Birdwing is in the background. The waterlilies have been embroidered with Aurifil Thread - yellow variegated.