Celebrating Local Artistry: LS Silk x Sarah – A Blooming Collaboration of Silk and Creativity

A cottage garden at the height of summer, hand-painted and carried onto mulberry silk. This is the story of Summer Bloom, and of the artist behind it.

There is a particular kind of garden that refuses to behave — where the foxgloves lean into the roses, colour spills past the edge of the bed, and the whole thing looks less designed than gloriously, happily overgrown. That is the garden Sarah painted. And that is the garden you can now wear.

At LS Silk NZ, our affection for silk has never been only about the way mulberry fibre feels against the skin — cool and quietly luxurious though it is. It is also about the people whose work the cloth can carry. Championing New Zealand artists sits at the centre of what we do, so that each piece is not simply an accessory but a small collaboration between maker, material, and the person who eventually folds it around her neck.

Summer Bloom: where artistry meets silk

Of all the collaborations in our archive, Summer Bloom is one we return to most fondly. It began with Sarah — a New Zealand-based creative and certified surface pattern designer — and a single hand-painted vision of a cottage garden at its peak.

Every petal was painted by Sarah herself: a wild eruption of colour, texture and floral whimsy, set down stroke by stroke rather than generated in an instant. Printed onto the finest 100% mulberry silk, the design keeps the soft luminosity that silk does so well, while Sarah's pastel palette and fine line work lend it depth, romance, and a charm that reveals itself slowly, fold by fold.

The artist behind the bloom

Sarah's work is as layered as the textures she paints. She brought her UK roots with her into a new life in New Zealand, and both turn up in her brushstrokes — Jacobean florals meeting Indian motifs, the silks of Spitalfields colliding with archive fabrics pulled from another century. It is a worldly, magpie sort of beauty, gathered from everywhere and resolved into something singular.

Her devotion to hand-painted craftsmanship carries a patience that is increasingly rare — and one that sits exactly right with how we like to make things. Slowly. Deliberately. On the assumption that an object made with care will be kept rather than discarded. Summer Bloom, in that sense, is an ode to joy and nostalgia, to the untidy beauty of a garden left to its own devices.

Advocating for local artists — the LS Silk NZ way

We have always thought of these collaborations as more than creative projects. They are a way of advocating for New Zealand's art scene — giving local makers a wider platform while staying rooted in the communities they come from.

So we love showing off the brilliance of creatives like Sarah: not only by printing their work onto silk, but by telling their stories and introducing them to the homes and wardrobes of fellow Kiwis. Through our custom silk production service, we invite other artists, designers and makers to do the same — to see their work translated onto a material built for elegance, longevity, and a lighter footprint.

Sharing the joy of design

From the first sketch to the final hand-rolled edge, Summer Bloom is what happens when artistry meets craftsmanship — when local passion is held to a global standard of luxury.

Design, we think, is meant to be felt, worn and lived in rather than admired from a distance. Every LS Silk NZ scarf is an invitation into a wider creative community — one that supports and cherishes New Zealand's art and design talent.

If you have artwork of your own you would love to see on silk, our custom silk service is where that conversation begins.

Whether it brightens an ordinary Tuesday or becomes a gift someone keeps for years, a piece like Summer Bloom does what the best collaborations do: it carries a little of the artist, and a little of this place, out into the world.