This year’s Felt Christmas Gift Guide has caught everyone’s eye with its beautiful kōwhai and vibrant colours, and we have Whanganui-based artist and graphic designer Helene Hall to thank for it. The native foliage and New Zealand butterflies adorning the Gift Guide are Helene’s stunning handpainted illustrations, artfully arranged to complement the fabulous array of beautiful products by Kiwi makers that features in the collections.
For ceramic artist Sabrina Ayling, Christmas in summer is a source of festive inspiration from which she draws bright colours, playful patterns, and profound joy. Emerging from the sleep deprived throes of early motherhood, Sabrina found in pottery a restorative creative journey that she has built into a thriving career learning, making, teaching, and immersed in the world of ceramics
Given the opportunity to craft bespoke furniture for a client during a villa restoration, builder Adam Ward found a new vocation, shifting from building and renovating houses to designing and handcrafting his own range of wooden furniture and homewares. The result was Eastwood Design, now established with a purpose-built workshop in Northland.
“Kia ora, ko Haylie toku ingoa.” Haylie Fry of A Slice of Poutini is a self-taught carver living in Te Tai Poutini, the West Coast. In Māori tradition, you should not carve or buy a pounamu item for yourself – it should be gifted, in the same way the stone has been gifted to us from the land. Haylie sees her creative journey as one of both receiving and giving, connecting with Te Ao Māori through mahi toi, her craft, giving back to her community, and supporting her tamariki, who whakapapa to Ngāi Tahu.
Winner of the 2023 Margaret Mahy Illustration Prize, Auckland illustrator and printmaker Alba Gil Celdran favours Japanese tools, techniques, and materials to create her prints. She carves her original designs on a linoleum plate and makes impressions on Awagami washi paper using a baren rather than a press. The highly skillful process takes patience and persistence to master, and results in limited edition series of each design.
In her Central Otago workshop, recipient of Creative Fibre NZ’s 2024 New Weaver award PK Maracin produces beautiful, one of a kind shawls, wraps, and capes, using only natural fibres. PK hand dyes fibres to make the precise shades she needs to create her unique garments. She has been working with textiles for more than 50 years, and weaves every day, sharing her love of the art at local markets as well as in her Felt shop, PK Sews & Weaves.
Waikato maker Jeff Fryett of Woodenjeff hand carves elegant and tactile wooden spoons and spatulas from green wood, fresh from the trees. Using minimal tools — just a saw, axe, and knives — to shape his products, he then burnishes them with a pebble to leave a smooth tooled finish.
Ōtautahi Christchurch potter Meg Roulston makes beautiful, practical, hand built and wheel thrown ceramic homewares with the aim of bringing warmth to daily rituals and make little moments special. The glazes she creates are inspired by the environment around her Southshore home, nestled between the estuary and sea.
Rebecca Lloyd is a seasoned creative who has honed her skills over many years across a range of industries, including nearly two decades as a sculptor and a prop maker in film and television. With her partner and two pooches by her side, she said goodbye to the big city and relocated to Mangawhai, Northland, to pursue her dream of hand crafting high quality leather goods that exude beauty and functionality.
Rotorua designer and crocheter Lauren (Soo-Eun) Lee is the creative mind behind the enchanting Roundline range of crochet toys and illustrations. Originally from South Korea, Lauren has built on her arts and design training to develop her professional life here in Aotearoa as a toy maker, photographer, and portrait artist.