“A Christmas Quacker”

With the ghoulish paraphernalia of Halloween retreating back into boxes for another year, London has already started to twinkle in lights and festivity in the run up for the most wonderful time of the year, Christmas.

Each year, the Kit Kemp design studio creates a festive wreath in aid of Place2Be, a wonderful charity whose lifesaving work ensures children have access to quality mental health services. This year, we have teamed up with Fine Cell Work to create a show stopping design.

‘A Christmas Quacker’ is unapologetically fantastical. With its 70cm elegant hand woven wicker wreath coated in natural beeswax, the impressive base was brought to life with these handcrafted Christmas characters created by Fine Cell Work.

Fine Cell Work is a charity which makes beautiful hand embroidered products in British prisons. They teach prisoners high-quality paid needlework which boosts their self-worth, instils self-discipline, fosters hope and encourages them to lead independent, crime-free lives.

Front and centre stage is Mr Duck, hand created by our queen of craft, Mimi Chanard. His smart jacket and waistcoat is topped with a frilly floral neckerchief. Despite being made from papier-mâché, you can imagine the feel of this combination of silks, velvets and embroidery – the perfect Christmas glad rags! Adorning his front is a collaborative white star with hand stitched lettering KK x FCW. Fine Cell Work made this decoration a little larger than the others so it really stands out.

The Fine Cell Work decorations we used are so joyful, little figures of polar bears with gorgeous folk inspired waistcoats (please can these be made into human size?), chunky tartan turkeys and snowmen in top hats. Each is alive with such detail and care; they really are an artwork on their own.

We used a run of a deep red silk ikat for an overscale bow which hangs elegantly from the bottom of the wreath. ‘A Christmas Quacker’ is available for bids right now. The winner will be announced on November 27th, so get quacking. CLICK HERE to bid.

We origami folded a square of felt around each bauble, using glue and rubber bands to hold the fabric in place. They were individually attached to the wreath using craft wire and hey presto, a wreath was born!

This is such a fun project which anyone can do from home. Start sending us in your most creative Christmas wreath designs using #DesignThreads on Instagram.

The fun didn’t stop there. We had a go at creating a wreath using some of our favourite wools to hang in our office this Christmas. Sustainability is key for us so we always try to reuse fabrics wherever possible, from cushion designs to Patchwork Toys, everything last scrap is utilised.

We created our own baubles by covering 70 polystyrene orbs in scrap fabrics from projects past. We used an array of wools in shades of warming reds, yellows and greens, a fun twist on the traditional Christmas colour palette.