Our presenters

Tzvetelina (“Lina”) is a professional cake artist with over 20 years’ experience in hospitality and custom cake design. Through her business, Flowerlina’s Cakes & Crafts, she offers fun, hands-on cake decorating classes.

Join her class at Wellington High School Community Education Centre and learn how to build a cake as you develop techniques such as wielding a palette knife, buttercream piping, fondant sculpting, and sugar flowers — no experience needed! 

See Lina’s work on Instagram at  https://www.instagram.com/flowerlinas_cakes_and_crafts/

Vanitha Loganathan moved from Malaysia to Wellington 2 years ago to live with her husband. She is a trained teacher who holds a degree in Teaching English as a Second Language with Distinction.  She also completed CELTA (Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults) in Wellington.  

When she was in Malaysia, she was teaching English in schools for 18 years. She also gave private English lessons to adults who wanted to improve their communication skills. Her participation in the Native Speakers Programme for 5 years, conducted by mentors from Canada, helped her get a better insight of how lessons overseas are conducted. She has since been incorporating the ideas to make her lessons fun and meaningful.

As a passionate teacher, she is always keen in developing students' English language skills. She believes in creating a conducive environment and carrying out interesting activities to encourage her students to participate actively and learn at their own pace through practice and self-discovery, thus developing their self-confidence.

Vanitha also loves to write. She has written a few stories on how she rescued street dogs in Malaysia and the stories were published in a leading local English daily there.

I am a registered psychologist with the goal of supporting young people to thrive and live with vitality and joy. 

My aim is to support parents to navigate their challenges and truly “tune into their teens”

Warwick has recently returned from living in Australia, where he taught English to migrants and refugees at TAFE (equivalent to the New Zealand Polytechnic). He also worked as a teacher trainer, training Australians in Australia, Turkey, and Vietnam. Prior to that, in New Zealand, Warwick taught English to migrants and refugees at the Auckland University of Technology. This included teaching General English, English for Starting a Small Business in New Zealand, English for Computing, and English for the Workplace.

How did his career start? While travelling overseas, he found himself teaching English in Cairo, Egypt. Warwick's thirst for adventure has led him to jump out of planes all over the world, take up white collar boxing and set up a language school in Bulgaria. More recently he undertook a 15,000 km road trip around Australia with his 12 year old son, on a Russian Ural motorbike with a sidecar.

Warwick is also a writer of fiction (thriller romance), and is exploring audio book recording.

Warwick said, “My students will learn and have fun doing so, even if it is in the evening after a hard day's work.”

His qualifications include : RSA CELTA, DipAdultTertEd, MA TESOL, MACommSt (Hons) 

Will Allardice started playing guitar at school, learning classical and pop tunes and after university, completed Trinity classical grades and began teaching Saturday morning classes.

He has now taught guitar, electric bass, ukulele, and mandolin at schools and privately in the Wellington region for over 25 years.    His interest in music/guitar ranges from early classical to the present day so Will has an extensive collection of teaching material and expertise.

Yvette is passionate about helping others create beautiful outdoor spaces and gardens. She created her own dream garden at home after enrolling on a couple of design courses and catching the “vision”.  After much deliberation and several designs, she finally settled on one. Then hardscaped and planted it up “with quite a bit of help from her whanau and credit card”. Anything is achievable when the design is done!

Times are changing. More people want an outdoor space that’s beautiful and has areas for specific purposes especially for families and entertaining.  Yvette shows how it’s possible to achieve all of this and now, more than ever, establish restful outdoor retreats as valuable extras when working from home.

As a trained teacher “back in the day”, Yvette loves delivering exciting workshops that are packed with information, interactive and fun to be part of. Taking on the challenges of questions, problems and never-seen-before scenarios of student gardens is what keeps bringing her back!

With 10 years of design experience Yvette also offers professional services within the Wellington region and through postal services further afield. But being a people person at heart there is another big dream - to help communities repurpose shared, uninspiring outdoor spaces into vibrant, attractive havens which will encourage relationships and reduce isolation and loneliness.