If you've started your Christmas shopping but are drawing a blank on what to buy that one difficult friend or relative, Lavender Rose Gifts might have the perfect solution!

With its abundant selection of colourful scarves, handcrafted gifts and cards, delicate jewellery and pretty furniture items, Lavender Rose is bursting with great present ideas.

"The shop is full of all sorts of weird and wonderful things," says owner, Karen Harpin, who tells me that she has always loved fabrics and interior design, especially the soothing colours and vintage feel of shabby chic.

Karen began creating her own furnishings and gifts aged seven, when she was given her first sewing machine. "I was actually obsessed after that," she says. "I would sit for hours making things."

At 15, she moved onto furniture, and began teaching herself how to reupholster and up-cycle chairs, tables and the like.

She soon began selling her pieces at trade fairs and shows across the country, and ran rooms at Robert Gleave Garden Centre and Browsers Bazaar, before finally opening her shop at Castle Park.

When creating furnishings or choosing her other stock, Karen draws inspiration from Scandinavian and New England styles. However, it is French interior design which holds the key to her heart.

"I've just got a passion for France," she says. "One of my lifelong ambitions is to one day own a chateau!"

"I love to travel to France for the gorgeous linens. I think I may have an addiction for fabric, as everywhere I travel that is the first things that I look for."

In a normal year, Karen would visit France several times, on the hunt for fabrics and brocante.

Paris's Marché aux puces de Saint-Ouen flea market, with its many thousands of curious and quaint bric-a-brac items, is one of her favourite places to explore.

"When I go to Paris, my eyes are everywhere: I love the architecture and the shabby chic style you find there. I spend a fortune when I'm there!" Karen says, adding that she would buy everything if only she could fit it in her suitcase.

Since the first coronavirus lockdown lifted, Lavender Rose Gifts has been busy with customers seizing the chance to indulge in some in-person retail therapy.

As we enter our second national lockdown, the shop will be closed, but Karen will be posting pictures of her stock on her Facebook page for people to order or reserve if they wish to.

She has already got plenty of Christmas decorations and other winter essentials on sale, and is busy making cushions, coasters and special lavender bags, so that she has plenty of beautiful gifts in stock ready for her reopening in December!