Dear lovely followers,

This post aims to highlight the sheer joy you get from supporting fellow makers & creatives and the utter joy a recipient experiences from receiving such personal gifts!

To give some context to my story…..in my art department at my school, two of my colleagues are moving on to pastures new. My Head of Department and my previous Head of Department who just happened to go part time along with myself a few years back!

Enjoying the process of giving as well as making, I took it upon myself to source the parting gifts for our dear colleagues. By choosing to buy from independent, local artists, we support our creative community and the benefit extends to all involved. I love thinking about what someone will like and enjoy, would they like something to wear for example?! Working as colleagues in an art department, one gets to know the fellow likes and curiosities and these act as defining clues!

So, for our departing Head of Art, whose penchant for geometric abstraction…….I had a notion that he would like the printmaking work of ‘Jonathan Lawes’, a fellow printmaker who is also a member of ‘Sonsoles' Print Studio’ in Peckham.

Below, you can see the beautiful A3 screen print.

For our fellow part time colleague who has a penchant for distinctive pieces of jewellery, I remember her liking the work of ‘Tomoko Hori’. Tomoko and I exhibited together at my house as part of the Dulwich Festival Artists’ Open Studios event in May 2019. Choosing a piece of jewellery by Tomoko was pretty tricky, everything is soooo beautiful! I settled on a bird brooch, somehow symbolic in the way that the bird is ready to fly off & explore new places. This seemed very fitting somehow. Tomoko prepared the gift in a lovely box, see below.

The whole experience of buying from local creatives is lovely from start to finish. The personal nuances, like collecting the work and sharing a chat, knowing the appreciation they had that you thought about their work in the first place; is quite simply a joy.

It also makes it far more exciting to share that with the person on the receiving end! Firstly, however, one must take great care in the gift wrapping process; and that job I take very seriously. Absolutely no excuse for poorly wrapped gifts. Hot tip folks…….magazines make great gift wrap, the sheen on the paper as well as the images…….take note!

A huge fan of neon, my best mate bought the best gift ever for me in the form of a narrow neon yellow belt that my jeans adore almost as much as I do. I used an offcut (never throw work away for this precise reason) for the gift tags and twisted some tissue paper as the twine. Washi tape is brilliantly sticky and is paper based so kinder to the environment than yucky sellotape. It also comes in a myriad of colours and widths!

Needless to say that the gifts went down a storm, phew!!

So lovely readers, wherever and whenever you are able to, please continue to support your local artists’, makers and creatives in any capacity that you can. The amazing ‘Sarah Hamilton’ who launched the ‘Just a Card’ campaign in 2015 whose ethos is close to the hearts of all makers and creatives.

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Thank you for reading this blog post, please do share this with anyone you think would enjoy it & encourage them to subscribe, this supports my endeavours more than you know!

Until next time, joyous summer days to you all, come rain or shine!