Sarah Appleton - Textile Artist Blog

My lovely friend Kawaii Helen from Nelly's Treasures sent me link a few days ago to a tutorial for overhauling old penny loafers . Which excited me in my tummy department. Behold before: Behold after: Rawr Much more tinglifying I think? The only things I did differently from the tutorial was that I used a flocked/velvet/furry fabric that I had lying around (as opposed to felt) and I used this kind of UHU glue because I thought a) it might work better on patent leather b) it is transparent so if I get it all over my hands/shoes/face it's not too much of a big deal. You can hardly tell they're DIY'ed (unless you are kissing my shoes) and best of all this project took around 20 minutes, despite being slightly fiddly! And it's like having new shoes without having to pay for new shoes! Yessssssss! Made to the tunes of The Detroit Cobras - Baby!

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...

After all the manic embroidering I've been doing lately I decided to take a break and work on some clothing reconstruction. My first project was 'prom' style dress to cute tulip cocktail dress. This is what I did (I'm hesitant to call it a tutorial as my pictures aren't great and my description probably won't be much better), click on the pictures for more detail: I've had this somewhat boring, frumpy dress lying around for years (originally from New Look); I'd thought about getting rid of it a few times but always held back because I am crazy about the fabric. I dug it out and tried it on this weekend and found that while the full on skirt and the length just didn't float my boat, the top half fit perfectly... and thus a plan began to form! First I figured out how much I wanted to trim off the bottom (5.5") and then undid the side seams to just over half way. Next I pinned the wrong side of the skirt into the shape I wanted - an angle fro...