Sarah Appleton - Textile Artist Blog

I'm really excited to share my next children's workshop to be held at the New Forest Arts Centre in August - crafts inspired by the film Ron's Gone Wrong!   This is a whole day event where participants can make crafts with me and one other artists plus watch the film 'Ron's Gone Wrong' itself. It's going to be a whole lot of awesome fun! In my part of the day we'll be making our own mini robot pals, something like this guy: To find out more information and to book, use the following link:  https://www.forest-arts.co.uk/event/creative-camps-rons-gone-wrong Hope to see you there! Sarah :)

Hi there! Further to my last blog post I can now announce that I have a really exciting craft workshop for kids coming up in the Easter holidays - Easter Egg t-shirt printing! Make your tummy look just like an Easter Egg by creating colourful printed patterns and shapes using reclaimed materials. For more information or to book, please use this link . This will be an exciting and artistic one for budding young designers, or just anyone who fancies expressing themselves creatively via the medium of the t-shirt! It might get messy so wear your casual comfies. 😉 See ya soon! Sarah

I'm not usually much of a Christmas person (I'm more interested in Halloween), but now and then I have a flash of festive inspiration and this month it involved Christmas Trees! More specifically my Christmas Tree cards, which I designed and hand printed and are now available in my Etsy shop : If you love them so much that you want to buy three or more, you can use the code PUMPKINS at checkout for a 15% discount for a limited time only! Earlier in the month it was Libraries Week and I had the absolute pleasure of making bookmarks and decorating bookworms with the kids at Corfe Mullen Library. Here are some of their fab looking creations: As you might be able to ascertain from the photos, we made collaged bookmarks out of old (discarded) books (not new books, we don't cut up those) and yet again the children outdid themselves with their creative ideas; some wanted to add feathers and long looping ribbons to their bookmarks and there were googly eyes galore. Fun was had by e...

On Monday I ran another children's craft workshop at Corfe Mullen Library. This time it was flower and plant themed and I had made a couple of examples for the kids to copy; a simple daisy in a plant pot made from single use cups and a drinking straw and my personal favourite; a venus fly trap made from a paper plate and some googly eyes. Can you tell how much I loved Sesame Street when I was younger? If you look really closely you can see that he has a 'fly' in his mouth. I showed these examples to the children but sort of just let them have at it and interpret them however they liked with the given materials (it's more wild that way): It's creative mess, OK? They came up with some really awesome plant creature creations! I really like that they thought to add their own features to the plants, like noses, tongues, teeth and stalks and thought of ingenious ways of attaching them too! I also really enjoyed this very simple flower design, which looks like it belongs i...

Today I started out by finishing the Halloween creations from last week. There's three kids' workshops coming up; Spooky lanterns (which I created last week ), mummies and monsters and Halloween cupcake decorating. This morning I made the mummies and monsters samples to show the kids, so without further ado here they are: Many-eyed alien / monster, Vampire, Mummy Cone Dracula  I think they're all pretty exciting, but the vampire guy is my favourite. Other than specifically using bandages to make the mummy I had free reign to do anything I wanted which was really fun. After some general admin duties (washing out jam jars for the lantern workshop) and lunch, it was time to start working on some christmas goodies! Decorations for the christmas exhibition and decorative christmas kites for another upcoming workshop. I didn't take any photos of those yet but all will be revealed in it's glittery gloriousness soon! Then at 4 o'clock it was time for the ...