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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The other day I shared some cross stitch patterns with ornaments on them, so this time around I wanted to share cross stitch patterns that you can use as ornaments. It would be fun to do a whole tree in your craft room with cross stitch ornaments, or just add a few to your tree or give them as gifts.

These little quilt inspired cross stitch patterns from Flamingo Toes look like ornaments and fit in 3-inch hoops, which are perfect for hanging on the tree or using to decorate a gift. I love the pastel colors on these but you can use more traditional Christmas colors if you like.

This cute Christmas tree from Lagodargetoshop uses a single color and fits in a 4-inch hoop, but you could make it smaller if you wanted by trimming the last ornaments and gifts from the sides, or just stitch the tree without any other embellishments. Either way it’s a cute addition to your holiday tree.

Stitched Modern has a super cute collection of retro Christmas ornament cross stitch patterns from designer Gera. This is a printed pattern that will be shipped to you. Each pattern is about 40 by 56 stitches, or 2.9 by 4 inches/7.4 by 10 cm on 14 count fabric. To work the whole set you’ll need 20 colors of floss.

These snowflake ornaments from Our Little Handmade Home are each about 2.5 inches/6.4 cm when stitched on 14 count fabric, and they use a single color of floss. They are pretty in red but you could also do white on a blue or black background, or whatever suits your other Christmas tree decorations!

From the description it sounds like this set of vintage style cross stitch characters is presented as one large chart, but the photo from Sampler Antique Stitch shows each of them stitched up as their own little ornament, so it gets included here. You’ll find Santa and snowmen in different poses in this cute collection.

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