Sarah Appleton - Textile Artist Blog

My third day of volunteering at Walford Mill Crafts began with the creative cupcake decorating workshop for kids. This course is run by Lauren Foster of The Cakery Shop  and it was a lot of fun. First we set up the workshop with tools of the trade and places for everyone: Then once everyone had arrived Lauren demonstrated on some sample cupcakes a few techniques for the kids to try out: I can confirm that these were delicious And after that the kids were let loose to decorate theirs however they pleased, and here are some of the results: The kids were really clever and creative and didn't just stick to the examples that were shown. I have never decorated a cupcake and therefore mostly stuck stickily to the perimeter passing different coloured icings and tools and giving tidbits of common sense type advice. And talking about cats. After that it was time to clear up and then finish the decorative christmas kite I started making last week for the kids workshop on 17th ...

Over the past month I've been teaching and assisting with quite a few kids craft classes as part of the summer spark program, so this post is to show off a few of the things we've been up to. A lot of these are sea themed to coincide with our current 'By The Sea' exhibition at Walford Mill Crafts . One of the first was this 'jumpin' jellyfish' workshop that I led: These were made from the plastic dome lids of fancy smoothie cups, decorated with coloured tissue and glitter, with scraps of fabric, ribbon and yarn for tentacles and strung onto a decorative stick with elastic to make them jump up n down! Another workshop I ran was a hand sewing workshop for 8+ year olds. Although I'd never done this before and had some reservations about how it would work, it went really well, the kids were fantastic and really enjoyed it and also made some fabulous felt sea creatures: I gave them stencils to cut the patterns out from, but the rest of the work was ...

Last week I took on a children's t-shirt printing workshop at the Forest Arts Centre in New Milton. I really wanted to give the workshop an eco-friendly angle, so I collected lots of found objects from discarded handles to single use plastics in various shapes and sizes and we used these dipped in specialist paint to create repeating and abstract patterns.  After giving minimal instructions I let the kids experiment on sheets of paper before printing their t-shirts and they came up with some wonderfully creative and colourful designs to wear on their Easter holidays. I'll let the shirts speak for themselves! A sample shirt created by me! A few experiments on paper... ...Before the real thing! I love how each t-shirt came out completely differently, with every one expressing something about the personality of its wearer. The children really seemed to enjoy it, they didn't get too messy and weren't phased by facing the blank white canvas of a t-shirt! A success all around...

It's Easter half term and that means lots of kid's craft clubs to teach at Walford Mill Crafts! I started off my classes by making curly paper snails: Brian This was part of a 'speed-crafting' activity we put on for a local school wherein the children had 3 craft activities to do in 20 minute intervals. We had a theme of Easter / Garden and I decided to keep mine fairly simple since there's usually a range of abilities and it was such a limited time frame. Next, back at the Mill, we hosted a children's crafty birthday party for a little girl where the kids made jewellery and decorated boxes to keep their jewels in.  Caroline  created hand printed, cut and dyed butterflies and seahorses from aluminium for the girls to make into necklaces... and I was lucky enough to be given a leftover seahorse to make my own beautiful mermaid jewels (thanks Caroline)! Neigh-thanial Here's some of the boxes that the kids made: As you can see they had an Easter ...

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...