Sarah Appleton - Textile Artist Blog

Last month I was honoured to be chosen, amongst several other talented artists from the local area, to take part in an open call pop-up exhibition at Patch in Bobby's, Bournemouth. The 'At Home' exhibition, curated by Millie Lake , invited artists to submit work reflecting on the concept of home, resulting in a diverse set of artworks being displayed. And without the possibility of hanging pieces from the wall, an exciting array of creative display methods! The piece of work that I submitted is called 'A Woman's Place'. Here it is, in situ at the exhibition: Photo by Eliza Naden 'A Woman's Place' questions cliched and outdated ideas of a woman's role in the household and suggests that 'home' does not always equate to safety. Here's a few of the other pieces that really caught my eye: Martin Roberts - I Want To Go Home Amara Leeming - Comfort Foods Carmel De'Lisser - My Soul's Home Esmee Rundle - Mars Starlord Zoe Larkins - Hom...

This week I have been travelling around Hampshire delivering eco-friendly textile repair and reclaim workshops for Hampshire Libraries. Regular readers will remember that I did this last year  too. For this year's sessions I ran another patching workshop, where we worked on creative ways to patch up holes in clothes and for the second workshop, I was tasked with coming up with a craft that was green, thrifty and useful in nature - so we cut up old clothing to weave into trivets and coasters! This is a bit of a fiddly task, but many of the attendees of these workshops said that they found the braiding relaxing and everyone came away with a really lovely looking creation with a huge variety in results. Here's a few of my favourites from the week, although there were many more great makes: I should probably add that these sessions were only 45 minutes each, which is not a lot of time to make anything, so everyone did amazingly well. Thanks to all who came along and had a go and to...

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 throughout his life - but especially in his old age - 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 ...