Sarah Appleton - Textile Artist Blog

Yesterday I took a day tripper out to the Isle of Wight to visit The New Carnival Company  at their fabulous studio space in Ryde. I was put in touch with them via a contact at the Arts Council, who (correctly) thought that my  costume and mask  based work would complement the costumes made by The NCC and that I might be interested in working with them. As a complete film fanatic, finding out how to make big props and costumes really appeals to me too. So yesterday I took two trains and then a ferry: I love boats, me and found myself on the island. I met the friendly and welcoming NCC team and after a bit of a chat and a lovely and much-needed cup of tea I was set straight to work on a taster day! 'Work' in this case meant sitting in on a prototyping session of the carnival costumes for a local school. The in-house artists collaborate with the pupils and teachers to come up with costume ideas based on the current year's Mardi Gras theme (this year's theme is Refl...

I've been wanting to make more dresses to improve my sewing skills and kill time / use up excess fabric stash so since my friend Aimi is always complimenting my dresses I offered to make her one for her birthday. She had already picked out a fabric she liked from a bargain hoard I bought from lovely Helen : And although I secretly wanted to keep that fabric for myself, as everyone knows, bagsy is a complete and final done deal! I used vintage Style pattern 2382 again: Regular readers might remember that I used it before for this dress , except this time I made it sleeveless (last time I used the sleeve pattern from the overcoat and adjusted it for use in the dress). This pattern is not really intended for stretch fabrics, but the fabric I was using was stretchy, however I found that it didn't make much difference other than being slightly trickier to sew! Despite that it turned out as one of the most well-made and fabulous dresses I've ever created: And luckily ...