A New Year and a New Start

It is a tradition on this blog to share what is on the looms at the beginning of the year.  This year they are both empty!

But there is weaving related things going on, there was a brief moment of winter sun so I tried to do some photos of the lavender collapse weave wool scarf for the Etsy store, WovenBeauty.  I’m trying a coloured background to see if I can get the pale colour of the scarf to show correctly.

There is also a photo shoot for a blog post going on in the kitchen with tubs of colourful Tencel.  

We have been knee deep in snow for what feels like weeks but yesterday the weather changed and the snow started to quickly melt away.  There are some hidden treasures waiting in the garden.  A lovely pansy blooming is a welcome reminder that spring in coming.

On Vancouver Island there are Anna’s Hummingbirds who stay the winter and we have 3 in the back garden staking out the bird feeder.  

This year they got a Christmas present of a hummingbird feeder heater!  It was quite the hit during the cold snap that we just had.

How I Do Photos for Etsy

I’ve not been weaving lately but I have been tidying up our Etsy shop, WovenBeauty.  First I redid the photos for the tea towels.  I've been experimenting with styles of photos, trying to get photos that are quick and easy to do and still show the product to the best of my abilities.  I use to have the tea towels on a plain white background but they looked like weird flying carpets, so I started incorporating the kitchen countertop for the photos.  This gives a sense of scale and grounds the photos. One drawback is that the light isn’t the best in the kitchen because we have a skylight competing with a north facing window so the photos can be quite grey, especially now that we are going into the winter months.  Here are two photos for the purple striped tea towels, the first is the old photo of weird flying carpet tea towel and the second is the new style photo on the kitchen counter.  Much better!

I have also restyled the first product photos for the tea towels; this is the photo that first appears on Etsy.  I now use a wooden bowl to raise up the tea towels on the vertical, not just lying flat, because then you can see more of the tea towel and scale.  To the side of the photo I have included a stack of tea towels; these are the tea towels that match the tea towel being shown on the bowl.  When we do different colours of tea towels I like to split up the listings, one colour per listing; then by having the stack to the side customers can see that there is more than one tea towel available in the series.  Old photo for a turquoise and white tea towel and the new updated photo below. 

  

Last week I spent some time doing photos and making videos for the table linens.  Etsy recommends having seasonal photos so I did some winter themed product photos and I will change the first product photos for the table linens to the winter themed ones over the next week.  At the same time I did some videos of the table linens and that was a challenge!  Here is an example video for a red lace table runner. The winter light is terrible so I'll be redoing the videos in the spring, but these videos seem to work as I sold a runner just yesterday!

This week I’m retaking the photos for the shawls, now we can have up to ten photos for each listing, right now for the shawls I only have six so I took some more photos to fill the missing spots.  In one day I took over 660 photos of just 7 shawls!  Now it will take some time to process the photos so it’ll be a couple of weeks before the new photos hit the store.

Since the shawls are unpacked, I decided that I should do some videos for them also.  I wanted to do them outside showing the colours of the shawls in natural light, but the cold Artic air and the garden not being at its best, this means that I have to find a spot inside.  The slate fireplace in the studio made for a lovely backdrop.  The navy echo shawl is a good example on how well a video can help customers to see the true colours of the shawl, the green and magenta in the warp is quite hard to see in photos.

Looking at the shop I still need to top up the photos for about ten items; mainly for the knitted items and the skeins.  Hopefully I’ll get a couple more nice days for the product photography and maybe some more videos!

Final photo is of my orange, grow outside in Canada!  It was hard to tell when the orange was ripe, but the internet told me that when all the leaves fall off the tree the orange would be ripe.  Well there were still some leaves on the tree but one morning the orange had fallen off the tree, so I considered it done.  We cut it open to look inside, there is a lot of pith and the juice is quite bitter and we found three seeds inside!

Everything but Weaving

Etsy has a new feature; videos.  I was part of the prototype group, so I got to try it out last month and now it is available to everyone on Etsy.  All of our scarves in the Etsy shop have videos, so, if you want to, go have a look.  It is really surprizing how long it took to do short 15 second videos for each of the scarves, but I think that they are going to be worth it.  It's lovely to see them outside in natural light to get a better idea of their colour and this is especially true for green scarves.  This example is one of my favorites because of the little bird in the background.

I have also been doing product photos for the new sets of tea towels and I have been trying out some different looks for the tea towels.  I am going to redo some photos for the older tea towels because I like using the large wooden bowl instead of the yellow bowl or the silver colander.  I like to have a cohesive look to the shop so some new photos are in order.

I also found that I liked to do a messy stack of the whole set of the tea towels instead of the stacking the in a fan shape.  The colours are Apple Blossom Pink, Pink Lilac, Lavender and Quince Blossom.  So the first two colours of the Spring Flowers cottolin tea towels are up and in the next couple of days the other two colours will be up.  Apple Blossom Pink and Lavender.

We are finally having some summer weather so every chance I get I’m outside.  Here are some garden pictures that I took today.

The Humming bird is hanging out in the Crocosmia 'Lucifer' (Montbretia).

We put down straw in the veg patch to keep the vegetables clean and mulched.  In this photo we have beans, cucumbers, cantaloup, zucchini, cutting celery, shiso leaves in pots, grapes and tomatillos, whew a lot is such a small space!   It has been so cold that nothing is as far along as it should be for this time of year.

This is the new extended area in the back perennial garden that I showed you earlier in the spring.  It always surprises me how fast the garden goes from ‘the plants are too small’ to ‘everything is getting too big’!

This and That

The loom is still empty.  Next week looks like it is going to be wet and rainy so I have hopes that I’ll have something on the loom soon.

In the meantime I’m looking through some magazines for some inspiration.

With the pandemic a lot of craft shows are cancelling so more people are turning to online sources for selling, like Etsy.  I thought that it may be interesting to show how I take my photos.  The walls in my house are a lovely shade of yellow, which adds a terrible yellow shade to photographs.  The work around that I use is a sheet of rigid insulation covered with white fabric; it is lightweight and easy to move around.

The best light in the house is the master ensuite.  I usually wait for a sunny day to take my product photos but to show you the set up I took this photo on a grey rainy day.  I always take my photos in landscape, never portrait.

Below is a product photo I took a couple of weeks ago and then I use Photoshop to tidy up the background.  I like to leave the product in the photo as untouched as possible.

Orange watch 2020 update, we now have flowers!

Final Garden Photo is The Lily of the Valley (Convallaria majalis).  They are starting to unfurl and bloom, so pretty.  A neighbour gave us some daylilies that had a few Lily of the Valley hidden within, the daylilies are long gone, but the Lily of the Valley remain.  Funny how you start to accept that some things are going to live regardless of how many times you pull them out!