Sarah Appleton - Textile Artist Blog

Yesterday I took part in a lino cutting taster class at  Walford Mill  with resident printmaker  Robin Mackenzie . Robin specialises in illustration and printmaking of the wood engraving and linocut variety and is just an all-round tip top bloke and jolly good egg. We started off the class by flipping through some print books for ideas of texture and mark making. Robin welcomes complete newbies to his classes (which is just as well as we nearly all were!); I've done a little bit of  lino printing  before but nothing to get excited about. Everyone brought a photo or sketch to work from but we were provided with all the other essential equipment we needed: I had an original sketch to work from: I wanted to do something fun and in my own unique illustrative style; although I knew that all this detail might be pushing it for a 2 hour class I was up for a little challenge! Once we'd all sketched out our compositions and were happy with the design, we proceede...

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 ...