Sarah Appleton - Textile Artist Blog

Earlier in the year I applied for the BA Bursary award from the Quilters' Guild of the British Isles and having been chosen as a finalist was invited to display my work as part of the Festival of Quilts in the NEC, Birmingham. Well that happened last week and so I found myself and my creature pals on the road once again! This was the first time I'd set up an exhibition all by myself (without help from tutors or technicians), which was both liberating and a bit scary. Due to my work being all kinds of little pieces rather than a few big ones, I elected to invest in some bookshelves to display my heads on; the thought being that I then wouldn't have to drill into the wall and also I really wanted to make them into a kind of totem pole effect, reflecting the kind of folky side to my work. Totem I was quite pleased with the way that this turned out, luckily all the other gals on the bursary stand were really friendly and we all helped each other out a bit. It felt good to...

In July I was asked to help out with the Dot.Tea's window display in Westbourne, Bournemouth. Dot. Tea's is renowned around Westbourne for their creative and fun window displays and so I was very excited to be part of such a fun project. This season's window display was all about holidays and Dot's needed some vintage style holiday clothes to be made for a gaggle of Barbies / Sindys and one Ken! This was a dream project for me; being an overgrown child I have a soft spot for toys and of course making vintage style clothes is a passion of mine  so the two combined made my creative juices very juicy indeed. I started out trying to freehand make the clothes but quickly realised that this wasn't going to work well as plastic dolls arms do not bend in the same way as ours, so therefore the clothes need to open in specific ways. Luckily when explaining the project to my mother, she remembered that she had a Barbie dressmaking pattern from my actual childhood and was able...