GOOD THINGS COME IN SMALL PACKAGES.
The year 2020 is proving to be quite an emotional rollercoaster for creative Christchurch teenager Amelie Coggan (above). The 15-year-old Marshland student has her own business, Little Joys, hand-crafting and selling cute clay charms. She started it to raise money for a school trip to France in April, but then Covid-19 struck and her once-in-a-lifetime trip was cancelled only weeks before they were due to depart… and just days after she’d paid the $7400 cost in full. To make matters worse, the lockdown also put paid to the new wholesale orders she got from tourist shops after being named the Best New Product at the NZ Gift & Homewares Fair in March.
You could have forgiven Amelie for giving up but instead she and mum Sara Jane spent the lockdown setting up a website, littlejoys.co.nz, to sell direct to the public. They listed it on the New Zealand Made Products Facebook group and, 48 hours later, had 3700 likes and 100 new orders.
Amelie’s Little Joys, from wee Worry Monsters to Kia Kaha kiwis wearing “beak” masks, are sold in small glass jars with an uplifting message. They’re a nice reminder that even in hard times,
Her Courage Bunnies, for example, promise to “nibble up all your fears until they’re gone.”
From small acorns, mighty oaks grow. But West Auckland artist Marama Davis has other uses for those little “hats” that acorns doff when they fall from the tree (technically known as cupules, they protect the business end of the internal kernel from damage when it hits the ground). Marama collects acorn caps to use as rustic pots in the miniature garden scenes she creates inside vintage hardback books. They’re just the right size for her lilliputian lily-of-the-valley bulbs and dinky daffodils (below).
As a child, Marama says she loved playing with her Sylvanian
Families figurines
(didn’t we all?) and her fascination with small things has persisted. Her
and book nooks (above) take the tiny house trend to the extreme, featuring itty-bitty, botanically correct baked polymer clay plants, teeny tools and chairs made from wire muselet (the cages twisted over champagne bottle corks).
Marama haunts secondhand shops for old books (both for their hardback covers, and for the botanical illustrations she often uses as wallpaper in her scenes) and collects random odds and ends, from beads and seeds to papery cape gooseberry husks, which make marvellous mini lampshades.
A former florist and linguistics teacher turned full-time artist, Marama usually sells her intricately crafted scenes at markets around Auckland, but of course they were all instantly cancelled due to Covid-19. “I didn’t know what I was going to do at first, given that lockdown wasn’t exactly the time to find a real job,” she admits.
But the New Zealand Made Products Facebook group threw her an unexpected lifeline. When she listed her details (she’s on Facebook as @MoonLightingNZ and has a shop at moonlighting.felt.co.nz), she sold all the book scenes she had in stock and now has a waiting list as well as a big
fan base.