Beautiful & Useful Craft Fair 2024 - Garden Museum
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Beautiful & Useful Craft Fair 2024

This festive season the Beautiful & Useful Craft Fair is returning to the Garden Museum with a curated collection of Britain’s best designer-makers selling bold, bohemian and thoroughly beautiful handmade ceramics, textiles, art prints, jewellery, and homewares.

Beautiful & Useful offers shoppers the chance to support small businesses, meet the makers and buy one-of-a-kind gifts for friends and family this Christmas. Exhibitors will include The Curious Maker’s mechanical toys and velvet toadstool decorations; Jack Wheeler Woodcraft’s hand carved, Japanese-inspired bowls, trays and spoons; Richard Pomeroy’s porcelain mugs in all the colours of the rainbow; and Jill Pargeter’s Arts & Crafts-inspired linen figures, keepsakes and lampshades which combine her love of history, nature and poetic verse.

Makers taking inspiration from plants and nature include Jane Bevan’s objects, vessels and collage from found natural materials; Rachel Dein’s exquisite botanical bas-reliefs, Fleur de Cire’s wax-dipped paper flowers – a unique art handed down from the origins of Constance Spry’s studio in London; and Maude Made’s illustrated tea towels celebrating varieties of wildflowers, tulips, fruit and vegetables.

This boutique curated Christmas shopping experience is set in the beautiful surroundings of the Garden Museum, a medieval church building with a Dan Pearson-designed courtyard garden and light-filled contemporary extension housing the award-winning Garden Café.

The day will also include two craft workshops:

Bauble-making workshop with FoldedSIDEproject CANCELLED

Make your own Christmas decorations under the expert guidance of designer Emma Fisher from foldedSIDEproject. Using FSC-certified paper, Emma will guide you through the process, teaching you how to fold and make a selection of paper baubles, perfect for decorating your home over the festive season, as well as all year round.

10.30am-12.30pm, £50 | Book tickets

Embossed tin decorations with Clare Youngs

Join artist Clare Youngs for a festive workshop learning the fascinating craft of tin embossing. Taking inspiration from folk art designs and patterns, Clare will show you how to use an embossing tool on the foil with templates provided, or from ones that you create yourself. Participants will go home with beautiful decorations to display, hang on the tree or to turn into unique greetings cards.

1.30pm-3.30pm, £50 | Book tickets

Stalls

  • Allison Sylvester

    Allison Sylvester

    Allison Sylvester is an artist print maker and tutor living and working in South Devon. Her delicately painted, jewel-like miniatures of moths, birds and flowers, inspired by the beautiful green lanes surrounding Totnes, will be available alongside original, botanical mono prints and stationery. ‘My first Beautiful & Useful fair at The Garden Museum was such a wonderful, inspiring experience, I’m really excited to be asked back for Christmas 2024!’

  • Ange Benjamin

    Ange Benjamin

    I am a designer-maker of statement jewellery pieces inspired by architectural and sculptural forms - from modern art and architecture to couture garment construction. My work is made entirely by myself, by hand in my home studio in West London. I work in recycled silver, gold, precious gemstones and more recently reclaimed timbers. I originally trained as a physiotherapist and my knowledge of anatomy influences how my jewellery designs relate to the body. I have a passion for geometry, in particular asymmetrical shapes and the negative spaces created when these are combined or layered.

  • Cotswold Knit

    Cotswold Knit

    Cotswold Knit is a slow fashion brand of artisan knitwear and accessories. Inspired by the seasonal colours of the British countryside, Cotswold Knit focuses on meticulous craftsmanship and playful creative design. Founder and designer Anna Wheeler’s exquisite jacquard patterns and colours make for unique and truly special accessories. Anna uses the finest natural yarns to create distinctive scarves, hats and snoods, all knitted in small batches in the UK. Having created beautiful designs for Missoni, Whistles, HIGH Everyday Couture, Top Shop, Marks and Spencer, Tait & Style, Donna Karan, Calvin Klein and Alexander McQueen, Anna understands the power of unique design and unparalleled quality. These two principles are now found in her own collection. Always uplifting and original, Anna’s pieces are chic and sumptuous, and designed to be in your wardrobe forever.

  • Crafty Basketry

    Crafty Basketry

    Marianne has been a basketmaker since 2006, creating traditional and contemporary baskets from natural materials for commissions or stock. Working with both foraged hedgerow from the Sussex and Kent landscape and home-grown and Somerset basketry willow, Marianne can create a colourful, rustic, wild and textured style, or a very even, smooth and precise look. With over 300 basketry willow varieties in existence in all the colours of the rainbow, patterns can be developed, making each basket unique. The baskets are mostly functional and can make a real statement in your interior and set the scene. Marianne find the weaving process allows her to fully relax, and splits her time between basket making and teaching people the ancient craft of basketry, showing students how to bring balance back in to their lives.

  • Fleurs de Cire

    Fleurs de Cire

    A unique art handed down from the origins of Constance Spry’s studio in London. Charlotte has been making wax paper flowers for 30 years. Charlotte has exhibited at many fairs throughout the UK including House and Garden, and Homes and gardens. She has been commissioned by Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, Fairfax House in York and Attingham Park in Shropshire. Charlotte works alongside Interior Designers and is passionate about flowers, representing them in this medium. Each petal is cut from crepe paper, assembled into a flower, painted in artist oils and finally dipped in a coat of wax.

  • FoldedSIDEProject

    FoldedSIDEProject

    FoldedSIDEProject is a small independent design studio in North East Essex making hand folded unique paper decorations, lampshades and lights for a customer who seeks beautiful objects with a hint of Scandi styling that enhance their home or space. All products are sustainable and elegant, crafted using beautiful high quality materials and FSC-certified papers. Taking inspiration from geometric forms and natural materials, the lamp shades have a delicate, simple, structural quality which play beautifully with the light once illuminated, creating a modern, cosy feel. Workshops and DIY kits are also available.

  • Harriet St Leger

    Harriet St Leger

    My jewellery is colourful and joyful and I work both on copper and on silver. My inspiration comes mainly from natural forms, pods, buds, leaves and seeds and also fruit and vegetables. My silver work is engraved beneath the enamel to pick up the light through the transparent enamel. I like to use bold colours often enhanced with gold foil. The designs are stylised, striking and graphic as I try to find the essence of the form that is inspiring me. I have exhibited widely including at Goldsmiths’ Fair, I sell through a number of galleries and love to work to commission.

  • Jack Wheeler Woodcraft

    Jack Wheeler Woodcraft

    Jack Wheeler is a professional woodworker and artist based in North Norfolk, specialising in designing and making handcrafted wooden objects using a variety of traditional tools and techniques. Through a visceral connection with wood, trees and landscape, Jack is interested in pursuing craft skills into unfamiliar territory, and in doing so, opening up a dialogue between the natural world and cultural and historical aspects of craft and object making. Inspired by craft traditions and wood cultures from around the world, Jack’s work champions the use of locally grown timber and seeks to give pleasure and meaning through a direct connection with the natural world and the hand of the maker.

  • Jane Bevan

    Jane Bevan

    Using familiar little treasures that she picks up on her daily walks in Derbyshire, Jane Bevan creates objects, vessels and collage from found natural materials. It's the tiny details, irregularities and unexpected beauty of the smallest things that catch her eye, be it feathers, twigs or acorn cups. These are then stitched, tied or assembled into a collection of artworks which embrace and celebrate the natural world.

  • Jill Pargeter

    Jill Pargeter

    Jill Pargeter has been working as a print maker and designer for over 30 years. After studying printed textiles at Manchester Polytechnic she worked in a textile design studio in London and then started her own greetings cards and gift wrap design business. She now enjoys creating a range of decorative objects for the home including cushions, linen figures, keepsakes, printed panels and lampshades which combine her love of history, nature and poetic verse. Her work is inspired by folk art and the Arts and Crafts movement and is made by her own hands from original designs to hand screen printing, stitching and finishing.

  • Maude Made

    Maude Made

    Maude paints, designs and makes tea towels, aprons, bags and cushions. Inspired by the natural world around her; vegetables, flowers, fruit, birds and trees. She celebrates small details, the everyday, domestic comforts, God’s creation, gardens, harvest, the changing seasons and the home.

  • Quercus

    Quercus

    Su Trindle creates modern, clean-lined jewellery in silver and resin in her studio in Bath, Somerset. Enjoying the traditional precision of working with silver Su combines this with alternative materials and techniques such as resin: ‘Resin is such a lightweight and versatile material. I can add glorious colour and make bold sculptural shapes, yet it is still lightweight and comfortable to wear.’ A recurring source of inspiration is early 20th Century abstract sculpture and mid-century design. Su is a member of the Gloucestershire Guild of Craftsmen, Make Southwest, Heritage Crafts, Crafts Council and Find a Maker.

  • Rachel Dein

    Rachel Dein

    Rachel studied Fine Art at Middlesex University, then trained as a prop maker for ENO. She worked at Madame Tussauds, the Royal Opera House and Shakespeare’s Globe. In 2011 she created her first botanical bas-reliefs. Features include Elle Decoration, House & Garden, Vogue, Architectural Digest, Gardens Illustrated, Country Life, The Daily Telegraph, Martha Stewart Living, Gardenista and in books, In Bloom, Cast and The Botanical Bible. Rachel's commissions include The Dorchester, Le Manoir Aux Quat' Saisons, Restaurant Andrew Fairlie, Huishan Zhang, HIDE in Piccadilly, The Falcon Castle Ashby. Her private commissions are held in collections around the world.

  • Richard Pomeroy Porcelain

    Richard Pomeroy Porcelain

    Most of my life I’ve been an artist, painting in oil on canvas, and I came to pottery in 2015. All my pieces are hand built in my studio in Bruton, Somerset, using porcelain clay. I roll out the clay and fold the slab around a base. The result is a simple beaker. Nearly everything I make begins as a beaker. I manipulate the clay, fashion a spout and add a handle to form a teapot or coffee pot, just add a handle for a mug or leave it as a beaker. I use porcelain because it fires very white and shows the colours to their best. I use white tin oxide glaze for the interior and then dip them in the colour glaze. Occasionally a pot will come out of the kiln with a fault - in those cases I mend the piece using a traditional Japanese method called Kintsugi, which effectively covers the fault line with gold leaf. Nearly all my work is made to be used - and is dishwasher and microwave safe. I developed the forms and sizes according to my own needs. Therefore the rims are thin, the walls translucent, the colours strong. There are fun little jugs and big pint mugs, coffee pots for ground coffee and teapots for loose leaf tea. Tankard beakers for beer, little beakers for wine. Recently I have returned to my painting roots. I make very large cylinders and use them like a canvas, painting images or patterns in wax. The results are dramatic and still retain the intense colours and simple forms of my usual ceramics.

  • Robyn Hardyman

    Robyn Hardyman

    Robyn Hardyman works with porcelain, making decorative and functional wheel-thrown vessels – bowls, vases, moon jars and more. The pieces are finely thrown in pared-back, elegant forms. She is inspired by porcelain’s combination of delicacy and strength, to create pieces that evoke a sense of balance and harmony, and that invite contemplation. She has developed a glaze palette to complement the restrained forms, with a variety of matte and reflective surfaces. Robyn is a Selected Member of the Craft Potters Association and of Contemporary Applied Arts.

  • Sarah Rickard

    Sarah Rickard

    After gaining a B.A. Hons degree in Contemporary Craft where she specialised in ceramics and textiles, Sarah set up her first studio and has worked as an artist and ceramicist ever since. She now lives in rural East Sussex and creates her ceramics from her garden studio. Her range of decorative ceramics are inspired by a deep love of nature. She sees the natural world as magical and full of wonder and draws upon mythology, folklore and fairy tales to express her ideas. She works largely in earthenware and porcelain and hand builds and intricately decorates each piece, combining her love of drawing and painting with her ceramics.

  • Sophie Elm

    Sophie Elm

    Sophie Elm is a printmaker, designer and illustrator, creating botanical and horticulturally inspired linocut prints, printed homewares, and ephemera. Her work is driven by seasonal changes in the garden and countryside around her. As humans, we have celebrated nature and the changing of the seasons in all cultures. Sophie feels this is important to continue to do today and her work is her personal method of doing this. She uses vibrant colours, pattern and often combines typography too; an influence from her illustrative background. Although her work is predominately hand burnished linocuts, she likes to experiment with other forms of printmaking too, as well as hand drawn imagery and papercuts

  • Speronella Marsh

    Speronella Marsh

    Speronella Marsh creates hand-block printed antique linens from her Shropshire studio, and in 2023 she launched her first wallpaper collection that replicates the look and texture of her hand-block printed fabrics. Her designs are inspired by natural form embracing a gentle, muted colour palette. The limited-edition textiles result in unique and sustainable fabrics of the highest quality, which can be used for curtains, blinds and upholstery. At Beautiful & Useful, she will be showing her new block printing kits and coordinating fabric collection. Entitled Landscapes, the collection comprises three completely new designs – Coast, Fields, and Woods – staying true to the company’s ethos of drawing inspiration from the natural world. Each design is available as a block printing tote bag kit, as well as a fabric collection in its own right.

  • The Curious Maker

    The Curious Maker

    The Curious Maker presents a collection of curious things. Sophie invites you to turn a handle and bring a mechanical toy to life, to marvel at miniature paintings incased in golden lockets or delight in a velvet toadstool! These, and other treasures, are to be found amongst Sophie's work, all made by hand with the greatest of care. With a lifelong love of nature and drawing inspiration from fairytales and make believe, Sophie's work is varied and inquisitive. She utilises a variety of different techniques and disciplines encompassing vintage and antique materials which add a sense of history and enhance the feeling of storytelling.

  • Theo Wright

    Theo Wright

    Theo Wright is a weaver and textile artist who makes distinctive handwoven scarves for men and women. Theo creates original geometric designs and weaves them in natural fibres (lambswool, linen, cotton and silk). Every item is woven individually by hand at his home studio in Coventry. Following a career in IT, Theo studied Textile Design as a mature student and has been weaving professionally since 2011. He was selected for the Crafts Council’s Hothouse development programme and has since completed several textile art projects with support from Arts Council England.

  • WAX Atelier

    WAX Atelier

    WAX Atelier reimagines traditional techniques, from candle dipping to crafted textiles, using the natural beauty of wax. Founded in 2017 by multi-disciplinary designers Lola Lely and Yesenia Thibault-Picazo, WAX Atelier is a London-based studio specializing in unique, handcrafted wax creations. Sustainability is our core principle. We source local materials and manufacture our products in small batches using low-impact processes.

Image: Vanessa Bowman