Last week, four new exhibitions arrived at Castle Park Arts Centre, including a collection of original textile art from Liverpool-based designer Sandra Hepworth.

Featuring embroidery and needle felting using hand-made fabrics, Sandra's exhibition lends depth and texture to a series of rolling landscapes and familiar city scenes, drawing out their many varied personalities.

"I love texture and being able to touch things," Sandra tells Frodsham Nub News. "I just love making and creating; it doesn't matter what it is.

"I use new fabric, but also a lot of recycled fabric which holds memories within it." Sandra then "draws with a needle" to add accents of detail to her images, tracing jewel-like flowers into each landscape and neat windows and roofs into each urban skyline.

"Say, for instance, that someone asks me to create a piece representing the town where they got married," she adds, "I will use the material from their wedding dress to join it all together.

"I'm a bit quirky: I love playing around with composition, perspective and layering and never quite know where my sewing machine will take me.

"I want people to smile when they see my pictures, to see that there is feeling within them."

Sandra has long been passionate about textile design, and would often create clothes and toys for her children when they were small.

She even designed and crocheted her own outfit for her sister's wedding over 40 years ago.

As she starts work on a new piece, Sandra will pick out a selection of complementary fabrics, working on each element of the city or landscape separately before fitting the different components of the image together.

"If I put something together that I'm not completely happy with, I will always do something else with it, either cutting it up or putting heat on it until it's right," she explains.

The result is a series of beautifully composed, three dimensional pieces which seem to lift out of their frames in a tactile layering of bracken or sea foam or stone, creating a sensual feel of movement and vitality.

After a year during which her pieces were confined to the inside of a computer screen, Sandra is delighted that Castle Park visitors will now be able to view her art in person.

"People might like the images of my work that I put online but they've got to see how it feels," she says. "I'm also a compulsive stitcher so it's lovely to get my pieces out of the house so I can set about creating more!"

You can find out more about Sandra's work, and contact her about commissions, via her website and Facebook page.

If you're hoping to find a special piece for you or someone you care about, Sandra is happy to work with you to create something that is just right.