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...

My time at the  New Carnival Company  has come to an end. I'm now back home in Dorset, feeling a little discombobulated after the Mardi Gras yesterday but very grateful and happy to have been involved in this incredible event! On Friday we focussed on finishing Gina's elephant. When I arrived in the morning she had already made him tusks and eyelids: Gina and George / Ellie / Bob I started the day by making heck loads of ruffles from sequinned fabric: Sequince We also had a make-up artist come in and test out face painting ideas on us for the next day. It was nice to have a mini pamper after we'd been working such long hours! Then Gina and I draped a headdress for him which was upcycled from a duvet cover: And I used my sewing skills to sew that and the ruffles together while Gina finished the details and decorated him beautifully: Later I finished a few little touches for my peacock costume (leg cuffs and final headdress adjustments) and was very surprised...

As Christmas is officially over, it seems like a good time to belatedly tell you all about the various crafty thingys I made for the festive period! First I started off with simpleish embroidered fabric decorations: [And a few paper ones...] These were inspired by classic retro shapes and designs and for the more complex embroideries I took inspiration from Constance Howard's book 'Inspiration for Embroidery'. Most of the fabric, paper and ribbon was salvaged / upcycled. Next I made cards in a similar retro theme: Photo by  LunarApple These featured an Intergalactic Space Reindeer with antennae so that he doesn't miss out on all his important Christmas telly [e.g. James Bond]. I also made cards with Christmas trees on but these seem to have eluded all photography. However, I did manage to knock up a quick reindeer gift bag too:  Here's a bonus picture of my marvellous cat looking splendid under our tree: That's it! Until next time!

Snikt Snikt! Today I was inspired by my recent trip to a vintage warehouse to make my own comic book bedside table! So here I am writing something of a tutorial so that everyone out there can so the same, because it's super duper easy. Before After What you will need: A boring old table (or other bit of hard furniture) Old comic book / zine / issue of National Geographic / porn / other visually stimulating material that you no longer want to read and don't mind cutting up (please don't cut up your ultra rare Spiderman #1 comic!) PVA glue mixed with a little water Paintbrush Paint in your choice of colour (optional) Wallpaper smoother (optional), mine was about £1 from Wilko Craft knife (optional) This is how I did it: First off put on some suitable music, I chose Bossanova by Pixies and to give you an idea of the time scale, the record is 40 minutes long and I'd completed this project from start to finish including washing off my paintbrush b...