The Edit | Nine presents under £50 for people you actually like

Every Christmas list has two halves. There are the three or four people you would spend anything on, and then there is everyone else: the neighbour who takes in your parcels, the godchildren, the friend from work who always remembers your birthday, your sister's new boyfriend. The second list is longer, and it is the one where most of us give up and buy candles.

I think that is backwards. The people on the second list are often the ones who would notice that somebody made the thing by hand, and it is possible to give them that for well under fifty pounds. Everything below costs less than that, and each piece comes from a different maker.

This is the cheapest thing here. Lucy Hook-Child plaits these from heritage straw in Layer de la Haye, in Essex, and a lovers' knot was once a token given at harvest. It is about twelve centimetres long, with a ribbon loop, so it can go on the tree in December and on a kitchen nail for the rest of the year. It fits inside a card.

Simon Cooper makes oak swill baskets in Crieff, weaving thin strips of oak that have been boiled until they bend. These stars are made from the offcuts. I like that the material is not wasted, and I like that a basket-maker's star looks nothing like a shop's. The smaller one is fifteen pounds and the larger twenty, and both are sturdy enough to survive being packed away in January.

This one is for a household rather than a person, and it suits anyone with children and a wet afternoon to fill in December. Three paper chain garlands, each about a metre and a half once made up, cut from paper Nichola marbles by hand in North East London. The designs are sent at random, though you can message her if you want a particular colour.

Natalie Tiede sets metal type by hand, letter by letter, and prints on the presses at the London Centre for Book Arts. This is a chapbook of four short stories in blackletter type, with block-printed illustrations and a hand-sewn binding. I would give it to the friend who already owns every book you could think of, because they will not own this one.

For the person who would rather have a witch on the wall than a robin. Strange Meadows carves every block by hand and pulls every print by hand in Angus, and the subjects come from myths and old stories. A linocut is a real print rather than a reproduction: the ink has been pressed into the paper, and you can see it if you tilt it to the light.

An original oil painting for thirty-five pounds. It is about ten centimetres square, on board, a sunset over Richmond Park by Joshua Lea, who paints British landscapes from the Thames to the Solway coast. It comes unframed, which I think is a point in its favour, because it will sit on a bookshelf or a mantelpiece without needing a hook or a decision about where it goes.

Everyone has a friend whose dog gets better presents than they do. Tightrope Knots spins the cotton rope for these in Cambridge and twists it into a lead a metre and twenty long, with a stainless steel clip. It comes slim or standard depending on the size of the dog. It is made to order and takes the longest of anything here, so order it first.

Encaustic tiles are the patterned floor tiles of medieval churches, made by pressing a wooden stamp into clay and filling the shape with a different colour. Cerameg Traed Bran makes them in a Cardiff studio after researching the originals, and says plainly that the craft is at risk of disappearing. It is twenty-five pounds, and it will sit on a desk or a windowsill.

Ksenia Semirova sends everything needed to make a red silk chiffon rose choker, with a video in which she shows each step. It would keep a teenager who likes making things busy for an evening, and it suits the adult who keeps saying they would like to learn a craft and never starts.

THE ONE I'D CHOOSE

The chapbook. It is not the cheapest thing here, but it is the one where you can see the work most clearly. Every letter in it was picked up and set by hand before it was printed.

Several of these are made to order, and the dog lead takes about five weeks, so October is the right time to buy them.