About Us

Creative Yarns & Knits is a family business with many aspects. Geoff and Gayle both hand dye yarns, Gayle designs knitwear and makes up the samples, Geoff creates one of a kind kiln dichroic and fused glass jewellery. Biff the cat (sadly deceased) was the supervisor and mascot. His replacements Barney (now also deceased), Minnie and Squid are not up to the job of supervising, but they are all great mascots! A new supervisor is Buddy the ragdoll, great at lying on projects & generally getting in the way!

 
 
Our background

Gayle has spent her whole life working with textiles, from spinning and weaving, sewing, knitting, crochet, felting and wearable art.

Gayle is an international award winning quilt artist. She was the first non American/Canadian quiltmaker to ever be accepted into the US Hoffman Quilt Challenge in 1995. In 2005 she was the first person in the world to have three entries in the challenge accepted in three different categories.

Gayle won the Waikino art award in 2004 and was guest artist the following year.

She has won numerous awards in art quilts, spinning and weaving and wearable art garments, and many items have traveled the world with various exhibitions.

Currently Gayle has been working on a range of knitwear patterns to work with our hand dyed yarns.

In the summer of 2019/20 Gayle was an artist in residence at the Rotorua Arts Village promoting the use of recycled textiles.

Gayle had a solo exhibition in 2019 showcasing recycled textiles.

Geoff creates one off jewellery pieces.

He individually hand cuts each piece of glass, thoughtfully placing them to form a one off hand crafted original piece of jewellery. The design is then kiln fired in our professional studio to meet our exacting standards. After firing each piece is hand finished.

As each piece is hand cut, no two pieces are ever the same, guaranteed.

When Geoff has the time he also likes to create mixed media fine art.

He also has a real green thumb and can make anything grow.