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’!

Tea Towels Just Keep On Rolling Off the Looms

The blue tea towels are off the loom, here they are waiting to be cut into twos and then the raw edges sewed to stabilize before going into the wash.  I machine wash and machine dry my tea towels before hemming.

I also steam press the tea towels before hemming, I think that it easier to fold up the hem.

It can be hard to choose which side is the right side.  There isn’t much difference between the two sides but with the tea towel on the right the pink stripe creates triangles which I think looks better.

It has been a cold and rainy June-uary but the last couple of days have been nice enough to sit outside and hand hem the tea towels.

I will give the tea towels one more steam pressing before I take product pictures so they can go into the shop.  Hopefully they will be available by next week.

Speaking of Etsy I’m part of a prototype group for testing videos in listings.  So I’ve been learning how to video my scarves.

Each video is only about 15 seconds long but it still seems to take a while to video each scarf!   I hope that the videos will help to show the true colour of the scarves because frankly sometimes the still photos just blah out!  Here is a sample video.

Since I live on an island there is always going to be wind, and I think that the wind adds drama and interest to the video.

Final garden shot is Salvia microphylla ‘Hot Lips’ and Jagged Leaf Verbena.  The Salvia looks like little Canadian flags, perfect for Canada Day on July 1st.