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!

Read These Next

From the front, the Simply Me Blouse from NORgardknitters looks like a plain, boxy, garter stitch sweater. The kind of thing you’d want to throw on every day, like the knit version of a sweatshirt.

But when you look at the back, you realize there’s more going on than meets the eye.

This sweater also has a giant pleat on the back, giving lots of volume and interest without making the knitting any harder.

Simply Me is worked from the top down, starting with the yoke being worked back and forth in rows. Extra stitches are cast on at the back to form the pleat (which is crocheted closed when the knitting is done) and the body is joined in the round under the underarms.

But if you know anything about knitting in the round, you know that to make garter stitch you have to knit and round and purl a round. To avoid that this pattern uses short rows so you can still knit every round and come out with garter stitch.

The sweater has a wide boatneck and a cropped, boxy shape with three-quarter sleeves. There’s no edging to interrupt the pretty waves of garter stitch.

The pattern comes in six sizes, to fit a bust from 31.5-33.5 inches, or 80-85 cm, up to 43 to 47 inches, or 110-120 cm. But there is a lot of positive ease worked into the pattern, so if you want less ease you can work it for a larger range of sizes. There are lots of projects on the project page on Ravelry, most of which show it in a solid color, but you can also see ideas for stripes or a fade. It calls for DK weight yarn.

You can find the Simply Me Blouse pattern on Ravelry, where it is available in English, Danish, French, German and Norwegian.

[Photo: NORgardknitters]

Take it Easy with a Bulky, Textured Sweater

Use Your Stash on this Stranded Knit Sweater

Book Review – Wilderness Knits: Scandi-style sweaters for adventuring outdoors

Read These Next

Have you read?