It’s craft season in Calgary. In the past two weeks, I have received emails from friends about sales of hand-blown glass, hand-made jewelry and pottery. The weeks preceding Christmas are the perfect time to shop for artisanal objects, not only for gifts, but for your home.

We have just received a lovely new title called Hand Made Home: Living with Art and Craft by Mark & Sally Bailey. The Baileys live and work near Hay-on-Wye, near the Welsh border in Britain.

They write, “The handmade home is all about creating an integrated space where you can live alongside the pieces that make up and define you and your family’s tastes.”

In the first part of the book, they examine the elements of decorating with craft, such as texture - “the badge of honour of the handmade home”. They advise the reader to think of walls as a blank canvas for display and to choose neutral and natural colours.

In many of the rooms shown, lively patinaed finishes offer a beautiful background for display. For example, a collection of hand-turned wooden boxes and vessels are arranged on steel shelves which hang on a lime-plastered wall.

The second half of the book takes an international tour of homes of designers and craftspeople. The tour includes a rural cottage in Hampshire, the Dutch farmhouse of a textile artist, a compact Tokyo apartment of a cookbook author as well as a Finnish forest house.

Generally, the look is the popular combination of rustic with modern.

It will have you hitting the sales.