Sarah Appleton - Textile Artist Blog

It's been a couple of years since I have run any children's craft activities but last Friday I was given the opportunity to lead a simple sewing workshop at Corfe Mullen Library. Using a kit available from Baker Ross, the children made some really cute 3D felt woodland animal decorations for their bedrooms! This was a fun tie-in with the Summer Reading Challenge theme for 2021 - 'Wild World Heroes'. Although the children who attended had varying experience with sewing, most of them just managed to get on with the kit with minimal help from me, so I was really impressed with their skills. I suppose that's the beauty of a kit that includes everything you need and is all set up and ready to go!  What is also interesting is that even though each child was given the set kit to work from, their finished decorations all came out looking beautifully unique and individual, with their own distinct characters. ROLL CALL! Lily the Fox and I Don't Know the Badger Poppy the O...

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...