Sarah Appleton - Textile Artist Blog

This past weekend I experienced the exciting combo of having my birthday and a good friend's wedding occurring on the same day, so I decided to treat myself by making a new outfit to wear for the occasion. I already had a stash of dressmaking patterns and fabric, so I chose one pattern that I had wanted to make for a while and a corresponding length of fabric and whipped something up! Regular readers will know that I am a lover of all things  vintage , especially vintage fashion so I was really pleased to find that I had a vintage fabric that suited the dress that I wanted to make, which was Simplicity 8505A - a reproduction vintage 1970s caftan: The fabric was gifted to me from a friend and I'm not entirely sure when it dates from but my best guess (from the colour pallet) would be 1980s / 1990s... but other people have said 1960s / 1970s so who knows: Vintage fabric from an unknown era If you'd like to vote for which decade this fabric comes from then please leave a comme...

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 ...

The last two days of my internship at  Nelly's Treasures ! It's taken me a while to write these up as real life jobs / DJing / beach partying took over a little bit, but here we go: I did a lot of screenprinting on day 6, and although it started out well (with a lot of help from Nelly herself), towards the end of the day my technique started to suffer a bit and prints weren't fully coming out, or were flopping off the edge of the fabric. I could try and blame tiredness or distraction but I think it's a case of not being fully practised in the art of screenprint. It truly is a skill that I imagine most people don't fully appreciate, and I have utmost respect for Helen and anyone else for mastering it! Anyway I couldn't figure out why I could make clean prints in uni, with not-as-good equipment and a lot less space and why I couldn't do it at The PrintHaus , and I psyched myself out and never fully recovered. Helen even gave me a step to stand on, but it didn...

Today was day 5 of my work placement with Nelly's Treasures and it was mostly spent finishing off these babies: Babies Which I'm super proud of because I kind of saw them grow from little fabric eggs into fully rounded heart plushy cushions! They look so cute and fun, I can't decide which is my favourite! It's really exciting to see the journey of a product from start to finish and I'm glad that I'm getting to be a big hands-on part of it during my placement. I don't have much more to say about today except that time seemed to go very quickly whilst I was lost in a haze of lovely vintage fabric cushions and suddenly it was home time... boooooo!

A quick update today to show off a dress I made last weekend using some vintage fabric given to me by my friend Laura (regular readers will remember her from  this post ); here is the fabric in colour: And I used vintage Style pattern 2382: which I had picked up at  Lou Lou's Vintage Fair  in October last year for about £2.50. Including thread and fastenings, the dress cost less than £10 to make! The dress is supposed to be sleeveless so I took the sleeve pattern from the coat and used it with the dress. I also had to make lots of adjustments as I found that the pattern was very big! Here is the dress in action on monday night: Photos by  Jonathan Salariya (I also DJ in my spare time). As you can see, I added little heart shaped patch pockets to the front because hardly any of my dresses have pockets and I like to have somewhere to keep my crumbs and bits of fluff.

I was recently blessed not only with the gift of a wonderful friend named Laura, but also with the gift of a wonderful friend named Laura who gives wonderful gifts of BIG BAGS OF VINTAGE FABRIC Big Bags Maudella 5443 And as I had previously been blessed with my friend Helen over at  Nellys Treasures  who recently gave me Maudella vintage pattern 5443 I decided to put these two elements together and came up with this: Faux Vintage But Also Really Vintage The brown squiggly one on the left I made for myself and the bluey greeny forresty one I made for Laura as a bon voyage present as soon she will be moving to Qatar to be a teacher. Nooooo! As for what else I've been up to; I've re-stocked my Etsy shop , am getting mentally prepared for uni (kinda) and today I attended my end of year exhibition for my Level 2 City & Guilds art course: Yup, that's me That's my work that I'm pointing the pointy at and also the lacy one above it. Yup! And her...