The Atkinson’s shop showcases a range of handmade items from local artists; prints, jewellery, textiles, accessories, ceramics, glassware, woodwork and more. The small collections are regularly updated and reflect our ongoing commitment to champion local creativity. Here are some of the featured artists & makers.

---

Rebecca Christian

Rebecca Christian is a local wildlife artist and loves to apply her artwork to a range of products. She has a degree in scientific illustration and 20 years experience working as a web designer and graphic designer before following her true passion of being a professional illustrator. Her inspiration is taken from the beautiful surroundings of the nature reserves and stunning Sefton coastline, featuring Antony Gormley’s Work. Rebecca expresses her passion for the beauty and fragility of nature in her work and wishes to enthuse others through it too. Rebecca enjoys painting with watercolour and gouache and also illustrates digitally. Art prints are printed onto the finest high quality archival matt paper, cards are heavyweight FSC certified card stock and scarves are super soft chiffon polyester that is lightweight suitable all year round.

---

Scenic Silks

Barbara has always been passionate about art. She creates beautiful silk scarves and ties, hand painted using batik techniques. Her designs are mostly abstract but occasionally she will paint ‘scenes’ for a commission. Barbara also runs workshops on batik from her studio. Barbara uses a sketchbook to gather ideas, often gravitating to botanical themes and shapes from her own garden or vintage fabric designs. Plant stems recur in her designs, the intertwining lines connect the petal shapes across the scarves creating movement and interest. Her scarves are made from Crepe de Chine, a luxurious draping silk with a matt effect. They are coloured with Dupont steam fixed dyes making the scarves colourfast. Items come with a card containing care instructions.

---

Alison Bailey Smith

Alison has worked with recycled materials for over 30 years since attending Edinburgh College of Art. She has received numerous awards including Scottish Fashion Designer of the Year and Recycling Fashion Designer of the Year. Alison often allows her materials to inspire the works themselves and during lockdown she started to look even deeper at repurposing items and reducing waste and incorporating natural elements. Because of this idea of using her own waste, these works are almost like a piece of social archaeology! Her work also often responds to specific current affairs such as the Suffragists movement, Remembrance Day and most recently broaches based on illustration of Covid19 itself. Each piece is provided with a card or checklist of what melange materials are included.

---

Bev Bush

Bev Bush is a Senior lecturer in Games Design at UCLAN with an extensive career working as a 3D Environment Artist for games and a Background Artist and Illustrator for animation. From this she has an understanding of both traditional and digital mediums and I love to mix the two. Bev is inspired by the places of her childhood and is currently using the coastline where she grew up as a site for investigation. Bev loves to draw trees and the variety of natural items she finds on Sefton’s lovely coast. Bev’s most loved medium is watercolours on paper, but she enjoys using a variety of materials including Inks and lino printing as well as digital painting printed onto organza fabric.

---

Nawal Gebreel

Nawal Gebreel is an innovative textile designer specialising in fabric manipulation and print. Her work can be found in boutiques and craft fairs around the world. She is also an experienced teacher, having been a lecturer at Southport and Skelmersdale colleges and now runs workshops, lessons and gives illustrated talks on textiles and other artforms. Nawal draws inspiration from geometric forms, tactile textures, the rhythms of nature, Japanese shibori and paper-folding. Also incorporating her worldwide expeditions through Europe, Russia, China, Japan and the Americas and her own original creative interpretations of the arts. Normally only man-made fabrics will retain their pleats after wear, so items are made from the finest man-made Georgettes and Chiffons woven in Japan or handwoven silk-metallics.

---

 Ruth Spillane Illustrations

Ruth is a local artist, illustrator and graphic designer who has been drawing professionally for over 15 years after studying Art & Design at Southport College. She currently undertakes illustration work and commissions and has illustrated numerous locations around Southport. She has a unique style of drawing inspired by the local area, she depicts urban scenes, historical buildings and beautiful architectural features. Ruth’s illustrations are created first with fineliner pens, that have tips smaller than a millimetre, onto 300gsm watercolour paper which has a rich, thick texture. Then adding inks and watercolours builds depth with the highest attention to detail

---

ZedBags

For Zylpha Thomson making bags is the natural progression of a lifetime of sewing, it is far more forgiving than making clothes as one size fits all! She has tried several bag designs but has found the simple shopper with it’s sturdy handles is the style that is most versatile and popular. Zylpha loves catching sight of a ZedBag on someone’s shoulder, doing the job it was made for, out on a retail therapy trip! She usually uses fabric that she refers to as ‘rescued’. She searches off-cuts, end of line pieces and samples for lightweight stylish materials. If she makes more than one bag in the same fabric, she tries to make sure that they are not exact copies by choosing different linings or handles.

---

Ally Noble Glass

Ally has a design degree from Liverpool Polytechnic and worked in the arts for 30 years mainly as a computer artist. For a more tactile artistic outlet she found glass and now works full time at her craft from her garden studio. She exhibits in many small galleries across the UK and works on commission. Ally is fascinated by natural phenomena; movement, water and light. She works in layers and since becoming consumed by the life outside the studio windows has used layers more subtly to create birds and fish. The glass is painted with enamel and layered with ground coloured glass then fired at over 800’c. She sometimes incorporates more of the natural world by using driftwood. All the mini logs and wood slices are saved from tree prunings and dried under the hedges, becoming homes for local hedgehogs whilst they dry.

---

Ruby Cupid Jewellery

Ruby Cupid Jewellery was set up because Anne-Louise loves jewellery and wanted to create a range offering quality items that are modern, unique and affordable. Anne-Louise is inspired by emerging trends in style and fashion and tries to match this with her gemstones and metals. Natural qualities of all semi-precious stones mean there are slight variations between each item which adds to the beauty and unique identity of each piece of simple stylish jewellery. Every season there are new shapes, new colours and the look, style and tone of each gemstone play a large part in the pairing of stone with metal. Ruby Cupid Jewellery only uses quality materials such as Sterling or Karen Silver (99% pure), Gold Vermeil, top grade pearls and semi-precious gemstones.

---

Ayhoka

Barbara is a crafter and artist who loves to create, experiment and learn. A keen beach comber she got her start when a friend suggested she reframed a mirror with her driftwood finds. She found starting with an open mind means she can trust that the perfect piece will always come to hand when needed. Barbara remembers the sheer joy of arriving at the beach as a child and still feels that joy today when walking along Sefton beautiful coastline. There is usually a sea or coastal theme to her work or is inspired by the objects she finds there. Each piece may include driftwood, sea-etched glass, slate, shells, pebbles and stones, fragments of a china as well as other wonderful items delivered by the tide

---

Christine Corthorn Ceramics

Christine discovered clay whilst studying Art at teacher training college and knew immediately that this was a medium to which she could relate. After teaching ceramics for almost thirty years, she still experiences the same satisfaction and enjoyment from clay. Christine’s ceramics are organic in nature and inspired by water, its movement and its effect upon objects and surfaces. Sand, pebbles and rock formations are amongst the many starting points which influence her work. Christine uses stoneware clays and hand builds each piece using the traditional techniques of coiling and slabbing, sometimes using paperclay to add texture and emphasis detail. A limited palette of glazes and oxides are used to emphasis the surface textures and simple shapes which make up each original piece.

---

Clark Watling Copper Jewellery

Clark has been a sculptor for many years, making commissions for Prince Phillip and Richard Branson amongst many others. He started making copper jewellery when his mother-in-law threw out her old copper cooker hood. As a keen recycler he works in any and every material that he comes across to give it a second life. Clark’s designs are inspired by plants and nature plus historical designs and patterns. The shapes of the jewellery are often dictated by the shape of the recycled material, the studs on the larger bracelets were those on the seam of the cooker hood! To recycle copper by melting it down takes more energy than most materials, so reshaping second hand copper without using heat is far more environmentally friendly.

---

Diane Moore

Diane is a textile artist and workshop tutor originally from Lancashire now based in Liverpool. She creates her own new textiles and crafts unique items including one off wall art pieces, hanging art quilts and jewellery. Diane is always looking for inspiration and you will often find her in art galleries, libraries and exploring nature. Her love for mixed media textiles was born out of a love for texture, pattern and shape and a frustration at not being able to create that purely in paint. Diane’s beautiful products are made from fabric, fibre, paper and stitch and she handmakes them all locally in Liverpool.

---

Edna Thearle

Edna is an Ainsdale based designer and maker with a life-long passion for all forms of creative textiles. Having achieved several different qualifications including City & Guilds in machine and hand embroidery and an MA in Art History and Curating, she also researches new opportunities for design. She has found Inspiration for design in architecture and natural environments. Her textural, hand woven accessories are characterised by mixing natural and dyed yarns in the warp and weft on her loom. Her stitched textiles incorporate hand dyed and screen-printed fabrics that are manipulated and embellished with hand and machine embroidery to create one-off scarves and wraps that are tactile and comfortable to wear.

---

Mervyn Thomas Ceramics

Mervyn made his return to ceramics following retirement, having first studied it in the 1960’s. All of his work is made in Southport, less than a mile from the Atkinson. Sources of inspiration for Mervyn’s pottery include 18th century agateware, and 20th century Japanese art potters including Shoji Hamada and Takeshi Yasuda. Many of his designs are also influenced by his interest in nature. All of his crockery is made from glazed porcelain, the jewellery he makes has the addition of sterling silver. He also uses the millefiori technique to combine various colours of porcelain to make earrings with colours running through.

---

Stephanie Mann Jewellery Design

Stephanie graduated Falmouth College of Arts with a degree in photography, following this with a diploma in jewellery design from The Manchester College in 2012. She now works from her studio in Cheshire. Stephanie uses traditional jewellery techniques and specializes in acid etching, which enables her to incorporate her photographic images onto sterling silver to create pictorial textured pieces. Inspired by the world around us, both natural and man-made, Stephanie has a love of simple geometric shape. She creates bold, wearable, image-based jewellery, in a desire to capture the wearer’s imagination. Stephanie’s jewellery is made with sterling silver or 9k gold with crystal and gemstone inlays

---

Shrieking Violet Flower Jewellery

Shrieking Violet Flower Jewellery are a proud winner of the Giftware Association’s ‘Gift of the Year’ award. Their story began at the Glastonbury festival after a hard nights dancing, watching the sun rise up over the site. Spotting a lone daisy shining out of the green pastures lit a spark to capture these perfect natural wonders & create beautiful jewellery from them. All Shrieking Violet Flower Jewellery is hand-crafted with sterling silver & tiny flowers which are encapsulated in resin. The flowers are grown on site until they reach the perfect size. They are then carefully picked, preserved & arranged in to beautiful creations to be worn as jewellery.

Posted on 22 June 2021 under General news