FEATURE

Artist and outdoor swimmer Charlotte Savill starts 2024 in a promising position after featuring in BBC1’s Make it at Market television series. Her work is inspired by wild swims and her own outdoor synchronised swimming. Ella Foote finds out more

A week after Charlotte Savill features in BBC1’s Make it at Market series she is overwhelmed with interest in her swimming-inspired stained glass artwork. Her online shop sold out in 90 minutes, she received £13.5k worth of pre-orders and £12k in commissions. “It’s totally bonkers,” says Charlotte. “All of my pieces are one-offs and every one of them unique, so it is very difficult to make my work in batches. It is a great problem to have but daunting too.”

The BBC series, Make it at Market, pairs-up professional makers with amateur crafters to help turn their hobbies and skills into serious money and life-changing businesses. Charlotte has been a life-long maker and confesses to being a compulsive crafter, but it is only recently that she has made it a career priority. “My career has been a bit wibbly wobbly,” she says. “I graduated from university with a fine art degree specialising in sculpture and tried to make it as an artist before giving it up to travel. After that I did lots of jobs, some of them strange, like a retrieve driver for the Hand Gliding Association. I taught English in India before I ended up at a university as a counsellor, then gave up work to have my children before ending up working at a vets practice.”