Sarah Appleton - Textile Artist Blog

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 ...

In February, I had the immense pleasure of being part of the Hampshire Libraries Green and Thrifty Fortnight as a touring Fabric Repair Café. This was an exciting challenge, as although I have been repairing mine and other people's clothes for years (with varying results), in this case anyone and anything could have turned up! The idea was that I was to teach the people who came along how to mend the items themselves with drop in sessions and specific workshops; patching, darning and adjusting children's clothes. Many of the attendees already had some ideas about what they wanted to do so we workshopped those and I taught a few stitches, tips and tricks. I visited Basingstoke, Andover, Waterlooville, Bridgemary and Eastleigh libraries and we had some fantastic results at each one. Here are just a few of my favourite outcomes: And of course I spent some of my down time wisely, by darning one of my own socks: With 45 minutes for each workshop, it was more like speed repairing, bu...