How to photograph your indie crafts

lightbox01 There is a lot of talk about how to display your hand crafted items for sale. It’s important that first glance at a photo of your crafts. If your photo is too visually cluttered people can pass it by and you want to grab peoples attention and then keep it long enough for them to see your product, where they can buy it and what your name is.

For small items a lightbox is a great way to get a soft, difused, uncluttered photo that really showcases the product and not it’s surroundings. You can buy and expensive one from photography stores and you can also make one on the cheap and get great results.

there are tons of good DIY lightbox tutorials on the web and here are just a few that I have found.

Strobist has a DIY 10$ Macro Photo Studio tutorial that steps it out for you ad gets great results.

This DIY light tent tutorial from Digital Photography School looks similar.

Cheap Shooter has made a lighbox from PVC pipe.

I guess it depends on what you have lying around!

you can see peoples results in this flickr pool DIY Lightbox Addicts. OO, here is a flickr pool for other DIY photography equipment! I love the internet!

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If your cross stitch tastes run to anime, fantasy, Disney, gnomes and the like, you’ll want to check out TesLime Cross Stitch on Etsy. This Dublin-based Etsy shop boasts more than 1,000 cross stitch patterns, with a strong pop culture bent.

The largest category in the shop is Disney, and there’s a separate Disney princess category, so there’s nearly 300 Disney themed cross stitch patterns in all. Some of these are chibis but a lot of them are pretty direct copies of Disney characters. Do with that what you will.

There’s also a large fantasy section that’s heavy on Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, dragons, aliens and trolls. In the hero section you’ll find Star Wars, Harley Quinn and the Joker, the Avatar, and Marvel characters. And in anime, there’s lots of Pokemon, Attack on Titan and Ghibli-inspired designs, to name a few.

The thing that caught my eye in this shop wasn’t any of that, though. It was sardines.

There are actually several different patterns in this shop of cans of sardines. I don’t really know why, but they’re just so weird and silly that’s what I had to share. In particular this one, where the little fish are wearing little shirts. Why? Again, I don’t know, but it’s kind of cute, right?

This design is 100 by 130 stitches and uses 21 colors. It comes out to 7.14 by 9.29 inches, or 18.14 by 23.59 cm, when stitched on 14 count fabric (the pattern includes measurements for some other counts, too, if you want to make it smaller).

And all of that barely scratches the surface. There are more than 100 Christmas cross stitch patterns (these are heavy on Disney, too). A steampunk raven. A large collection of gnomes.

I think you’re just going to have to go check it out for yourself and see what strikes you. If you end up buying one of their patterns, I’d love to hear what you chose! Check them out at www.etsy.com/shop/TesLimeArt on Etsy.

[Photo: TesLime Cross Stitch]

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