Sarah Appleton - Textile Artist Blog

Hello and welcome back to my blog. I'm going to launch right in and say that whilst I try to keep this blog mostly textiles related, it wouldn't feel right to go on without acknowledging the passing away of my cat James, who featured in my posts on an infrequent basis. If you follow my Instagram , you will be very familiar with him. James was the hefty age of 19 when he succumbed to his various old-age related ailments last November and he was in my life, with me being his 'person', for all 19 of those years. Needless to say, losing him has caused a tremendous gaping scary void of doom in my life. It's been 3 months, and after having gotten over the initial shock of losing him, it seemed like time to acknowledge it here. Caring for him these last couple of years was a responsibility that I took very seriously, and it felt like more of a priority than Other Things, and I have needed time to grieve in every sense... so the textile news has naturally slowed down. But ...

In February, I had the immense pleasure of being part of the Hampshire Libraries Green and Thrifty Fortnight as a touring Fabric Repair Café. This was an exciting challenge, as although I have been repairing mine and other people's clothes for years (with varying results), in this case anyone and anything could have turned up! The idea was that I was to teach the people who came along how to mend the items themselves with drop in sessions and specific workshops; patching, darning and adjusting children's clothes. Many of the attendees already had some ideas about what they wanted to do so we workshopped those and I taught a few stitches, tips and tricks. I visited Basingstoke, Andover, Waterlooville, Bridgemary and Eastleigh libraries and we had some fantastic results at each one. Here are just a few of my favourite outcomes: And of course I spent some of my down time wisely, by darning one of my own socks: With 45 minutes for each workshop, it was more like speed repairing, bu...

Last week I was invited to teach a craft session at Forest Arts Centre for some local schools on the theme of 'Ubuntu'. If you don't know (I didn't), then Ubuntu essentially means 'I am because we are'; feel free to investigate more after you've read this if that has activated your curiosity zone. There were a small group of lucky students chosen from each of 4 local primary schools and along with dance and drama teachers in other areas of the building, I was to deliver 3 x 20 minute art sessions with the children rotating around each class every half hour. Essentially like the artistic version of speed dating! There aren't many arts and crafts that you can satisfactorily complete with minimal mess in 20 minutes (in my opinion) whilst keeping within the theme of Ubuntu, so I chose a simple collage class.  Many of the children knew what collage was, some being experts and some being complete beginners. I had collected a range of old books and magazines fo...

This week I was honoured to be invited along to Queen Elizabeth School with artist Sarah Redmond-Fareham to help work on a super exciting outreach project called Her:Story - a project about inspiring women throughout history (get the pun?!) Each artist was assigned a different female to study, and they all came armed with sketches and photographs ready to create a bust of their subject out of clay. Sarah setting up! [The secret is that the face is already in the clay, you just have to remove the parts that are not face]:) Most of the students had never worked with clay much before, but neither had I; Sarah is the expert and was a fantastic teacher as all the students ended up with great results. I was on hand for moral support, suggestions and cleaning up duties! At first, the students worked tentatively, but after the initial features were put into place, you could see the confidence grow and a lot of recognisable faces came out. Here are some of the works in progress (all work by stu...