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...

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

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...