26 November - 12 December, 2015. But mostly this weekend!

We love it when artists and artisans throw open their studio doors and welcome everyone in for a spot of shopping (and snooping). There is always a great atmosphere, plus tea, cake and wine, and you can always find something beautiful and unusual, often at heavily discounted prices. These sales, below, are our favourite hunting grounds for Christmas presents.

Cressida Bell: Wonderful cards, lamps, lamp shades, ties, scarves, wrapping paper and more for sale in this well-known decorative artist’s heavenly Hackney studio. Plus Cressida Bell teaches the best cake decorating masterclasses in town. (We did one, see here, in May and loved it). The next, a special Christmas Cake Decoration Masterclass, is on 11th and 12th December.

Lubna Chowdhary

Lubna Chowdhary designs and produces distinctive and beautiful glazed tiles and ceramic artworks for incredibly high-end clients. Once a year, however, she opens her beautiful David Adjaye designed garden studio in Streatham for her annual sale. You can buy samples, individual tiles, archive stock, panels, and the wonderful walnut and ceramic hotplates, pictured below, which Chowdhary designed for Margaret Howell, all at a fraction of their usual cost.

The Kiln Rooms: If, like us, you are loving BBC2’s The Great Pottery Throw Down, then you won’t want to miss this sale of work by 50 potters at The Kiln Rooms, a Peckham pottery collective.

Beggars’ Velvet: Makers Ros Badger and Kate Owen design and hand-produce brilliantly made, useful, and seemingly commonplace things (spoons, soap, glasses, tea towels, cheese and bread boards, planters), which are elevated into unusual and beautiful pieces by Beggars’ Velvet singular style of hand-printing and etching witty words and epigrams.