Sarah Appleton - Textile Artist Blog

Christmas is now all set up at the Mill and looking fabulous! Here's a few pictures: Looking pretty splendid indeed! Most of the hard work and graft was down to Krishula, Christine and Mel, although I wrapped most of the presents under the tree, and helped with decorating the smaller christmas tree and shop displays that can be seen in the last two pictures! I haven't ever really been involved in creating retail displays to this standard before, so I'm learning a lot as I go along and the staff have been very encouraging and helpful, which is lovely. I've been working in the gallery shop a more the past couple of weeks and have come to terms with the till and general day to day happenings now. I think! This week I was helping  Debby  with jewellery creating again; using her beautiful hand painted papers to make unique pieces which will be finished with resin. Here are a few that I was working on this week: In the foreground and left you can se...

Now that my nephew has had his first birthday I can finally write about what I made him; Karma the Chameleon [ pattern by Janine Holmes]. This is the most complicated thing I've crocheted to date, although I have been crocheting for a few years now (mostly squares for a never ending blanket). I actually found it a lot less complicated than I thought I would and enjoyed making it which leads me to believe that I should be doing more crocheting than I currently am! Here it is not camouflaging particularly well with its surroundings: I made a change to the pattern in the sense that I used a self-striping kind of wool instead of using remnants to create my own stripes (mainly because I have no excess yarn stash). Although it's not as colourful as the original  I like the way it turned out. The yarn I used is Euro Baby Maypole  in Sapphire Blue. Ooooh! The original pattern [as I mentioned] is by Janine Holmes of Moji Moji Design, and her website is well worth a look as ...

This week at Walford Mill Crafts we began taking down the  Fire  exhibition to start setting up the  Christmas at the Mill  exhibition! This is very exciting and obviously involves quite a lot of work for all staff so it was all hands on deck this week. Along with my usual full Wednesday, I put in an extra couple of mornings I had spare to help out. On Monday we began packing up the Fire exhibition; my main task was to pick out the items from the gallery that had been sold during the exhibition, pack them safely in bubble wrap, add contact details for their new owners and put them to one side ready for collection. I also helped to pack up jewellery and other bits n bobs that hadn't sold to be sent back to their maker(s). David Walker Ceramics Some of the exhibits from Fire were big and unusually shaped like the above ceramics by David Walker . These are a bit challenging to wrap up but very beautiful of course. On Tuesday morning I helped out again, this time ...

This week I was helping out with the beginnings of putting together the special Christmas exhibition in the gallery. The first job of the day was to wrap up some of those pretend fake presents that always look so much nicer than any actual real presents. This was quite fun, as I actually enjoy wrapping gifts, plus it's amazing what you can do with just a little bit of brown paper and ribbon: Prizes After that I spent quite a while carefully unwrapping deliveries, checking them over and pricing them before wrapping them all carefully back up to be stored until the changeover to Christmas. Most of the goodies I unwrapped were ceramics and here's a couple of my favourites: Jessica Thorn Super cute cups, jugs and spice shakers by  Jessica Thorn , white outside with coloured seams and insides. Very yummy indeed! Alex Allday And very pretty, delicate ceramics by  Alex Allday  with overlapping surface patterns and textures, giving them a sort of 'lacy' effect. S...