Sarah Appleton - Textile Artist Blog

Almost two years ago I blogged about a blouse / shirt that my mum had made in ye olde years of vintage gone by, and I added a strange white collar which looked a little wrong and penguiny. Well I recently decided to re-vamp the blouse again with a different coloured collar; a blue very similar to the one within the pattern and it looks much nicer, behold: Before Nafter I also took in the sides and the arms (although you can't really tell from the photo) to make it slightly more fitted and less pyjama-y. It still has some baggyness though as it doesn't have any darts so I guess that was the style of Ye Olde Times. Here's a close up of the fabric: It's from Liberty! It feels very soft and nice and EXPENSIVE. Here's a peek of how I may desire to style it: Bow Selecter It also goes rather nicely with the oversized clutch bag I whipped up yesterday: I was fortunate enough to obtain the Art Nouveau fabric in a lucky dip bag from my good friend Helen, it...

The moment you have all been waiting for is finally here! The Spring / Summer 2013 Hectopi release! No two exactly alike. Check them out in my Folksy shop

Hola! I'm still slogging away at the art classes; we just started a new unit which is all about ourlovelyselves and last night's lesson was on screenprinting, so I thought I'd share my work since I loooved it! Regular readers might have picked up on my love of all things 60s, Pop Art and psychedelic; I decided to base my print around that theme and chose Our George as my subject! Our George Aaand here's the result: A Hard Day's Bright Bad Trip Since I'm pretty much a beginner at screenprinting they didn't turn out perfect, but I quite like the imperfections because they are interesting and sort of melty-like. You have to have mega strong arms and big piano hands to be a really great screenprinter; which is why I never want to get on the wrong side of Helen at Nelly's Treasures !

Jade hexopus is now sold out of my Folksy shop! Jaded But he will return!

Hello there my voyeuristic chums! You are wondering why I have been so absent aren't you? Well I'm going to tell you - I'm applying to do a BA in Textile Design next year, along with all the other courses I'm studying (art x2, fashion and sign language), so I've been mentally and physically getting all prepared! But today I am bringing you something old which is new to you. In May/June I whipped up this little beauty to wear to my Grandma's 80th birthday and haven't shared the pictures yet so here you are! Aww, that's me now! I used Burda Style pattern 7494 and the fabric was from Fabric Land . Nice, huh?! I like how it turned out although I only wear it when I'm in a wallpapery mood. I haven't yet finished the lining but that's OK because I wear a slip underneath for discretion. I got a lot of good feedback from ma familia so I felt pretty swish. That's about it, gotta run back to my application!

Well in all my excitement at blogging about Nothing New yesterday I forgot that I do, in fact, have Something New to blog about! How silly! It's actually technically not new either since it's a refurbished second hand garment; unfortunately I forgot to take a 'before' picture but here's the 'after': Suits you sir Now you will have to use your brainbox to imagine this shirt with no collar at all; just a plain round neck. Retro-a-go-go, but not terribly flattering. My mum made this shirt many moons ago (I don't ever remember seeing her wearing it); she'd even hand sewn all of the hems; and earlier this month I found it shoved in a 'to go' pile! Whuuuut! Obviously I was not going to cut this bad boy up, so a collar was the only option. I confused myself totally with the button / placket situation, so I made the collar finish short of that area and then created a bow tie effect to fill in the weird-looking space. I am really pumped with h...

Hey, remember the Hexopus I blogged about the other day? Well now you can buy him in greetings card form from my shop . The Hexopus is a magical, mythical creature from the dark depths of my mind! He will greet you with a warm, slimey, black hearted, six tentacled hug. More colours coming soooooon!

Oh hai. As I mentioned earlier I have started a textile printing class at the AUCB so here is a little peep at what I have done so far. Screeny, screeny... screeny swirly apples The first is a stencil/screen print, my teacher said it was very Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Art Nouveau - it was really supposed to be 60s ish but that’s cool because they stole everything from Art Nouveau were pretty nuts about Art Nouveau in the 60s anyway. I'm not crazy about the colours/tones I used but maybe that will improve with practise. The second and third are lino prints from a lino block I made about 10 years ago, ha! I call him Hexapoo or Hexopus, I used to draw him a lot and he's still lookin good after all this time. I thought the others in the class would laugh at him but the general concensus was that he's cute. He's supposed to be tough and swirly but I guess cute is the next best thing. I prefer the first of these two prints because of the colourway and ...