Sail fast - Live slow

After 3 attempts I finally got a treasury on Etsy. It's called Sail Fast - Live Slow My inspiration was an amazing sailing holiday I took a few years ago. We sailed from Antigua to the Grenadines and then back again visiting a new island almost every day - the scenery was breathtaking, because your sailing you get a fantastic view of the islands - there was a fair bit of hard work but that made the evenings off more fun! I think it's this sudden heat wave here has got me thinking about wanting to be on a yacht with a rum punch in hand!

I didn't want the treasury to be all anchors and stripes, I wanted it to be classic and grown up, some of the items are way out of my price range but that's the whole joy of a list like this - I wish I had a suitcase full of gorgeous items like this!

The name came from a touristy little t-shirt I bought on that trip, it said Sail fast at the front and Live Slow at the back, that captured the mood perfectly.

If you want to know how to make your own Etsy treasury click here . There is so much demand to get one of these lists as not only is it fun it's a good way of getting people back to your own shop - marketing again! Also this is often how Etsy will pick the items on it's front page and they'll credit you for it - so fingers crossed, I hope the sellers I've included get some sales based on this.

STUMBLE...

Warning - reading this could rob you of many hours of your life but you'll also discover an amazing array of things you just never knew existed! One of the Folksy guys mentioned it in a chat room the other day.

Stumble is an awesome idea where you click a button on your toolbar (it only takes a few seconds to download) and it takes you to a completely random website based on a few selections you've made about your interests - I chose humour, food, photography and craft. Then as you 'stumble' across these sites you can click like or dislike buttons (also on your toolbar) and stumble will take these choices into account and progressively bring you better and more interesting websites tailored to you!

Also you can add your own website, another way of getting people to visit my shops! So if you do download stumble make sure you click 'like' next time you're on my blog! leave me a comment if you want me to do likewise for your website or shop.

All the images above are clickable and will take you to a few of the sites I've stumbled upon recently, you just have to click the one that says MUTO - it's so beautiful (yet strange)

Emergency gift

Last night I remembered E had a birthday party today for one of her little friends from reception, and we hadn't bought a present... luckily I happen to have quite a few little girly items hanging around!

So this morning E set about making 3 bracelets to go inside one of my coin purses, we thought that would make a very pretty present for a 5yr old girl.

I set E up by attaching clips to the end of the elastic - I put everything in a dish for her, this seems to work really well to contain it all - and then I let her get on with it.

I just use little clips like this but clothes pegs or even a paperclip would do the same job, I find this vital for when E is threading... I've had enough of strings of tiny beads bouncing around the kitchen floor, followed by 1/2 an hour of scrabbling around under the oven - I have to be sure to get them all as P my 15month old is like lightening when it comes to finding beads and stuffing them in his mouth.

We use elastic that's quite thick so you can thread a few beads at a time, I bought some of the thinner stuff when I was first looking to sell bead kits, to see if I could save some pennies but it was really difficult to thread even for an adult. For E I find the 4mm seed beads are about as small as you can go before she gets frustrated and needs help every 2 minutes, I'll start giving her the smaller ones as she gets a bit more adept at threading.

She made six! Three for herself and three for her friend.

The elastic is strong and I make sure I tie triple knots - the secret of getting a good knot is to leave plenty of surplus elastic so that when your tying it off it's not too fiddly. If I'm feeling clever I try and make sure I hide the knot under a bead, you could even put a drop of glue on the knot to keep it really secure but I find the bracelts can take quite a good stretching before they'll burst (and glue seems a bit of a faff)

and voila a cute gift, and to boot E felt really proud that she'd made it and was (quietly) entertained for an hour! You can find my kits here if you like these beads.

Garden Treasury!

You can't buy this treasury though! (unlike yesterdays UK handmade treasury) These photos are just a few of the happenings in the garden at the moment, gherkins, tomatoes, pumpkins, courgettes and the seedlings at the bottom are going to be purple radishes, I'm not that keen on radishes of the normal red variety so thought I should try them. I included a few flower's and E's wendy house which we moved to its new position last weekend, it's now nestled into the buddlejah, she should get big purple flowers hanging over the windows soon - excellent for butterfly spotting.

The pot of basil is just a plastic pot inserted into an old chimney, it's great as it's at waist height. I'm hoping the patio will be finished fairly soon so we can have it down there, with all the other herbs and not all the way at the top - it's lovely to run your fingers through the basil, the smell is just knock-out, so much stronger than the supermarket pots - hopefully I'll be able to maintain this pot with careful picking so it keeps coming back, you can't beat basil and tomatoes, a little olive oil and balsamic vinegar mmmmm.....

On the crafty front I set up a shop on artfire - I keep reading good things about it so thought there was no harm in trying. It will probably be low on stock like my Folksy shop but I think it's wise at this early stage of my products to stick my fingers into a few pies and think this will help with SEO (but not sure, need to gen up on all of the tech stuff). Here's what it looks like so far... BORING OR WHAT! Perhaps some stock will help - duh!

Folksy Mini Treasury - There's more to Life than Pink!

There's more to life than pink!

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Sunny Yellow Bow, felt headband £8.00 Lupin, Girl's Liberty Print Pinafore dress £39.99 peakprincess, Dinosaur Alfie £20.00 Sew Sew, Rainbow Button Necklace £10.00 NuadaAccesories, Nellephant CoinPurse £12.00 Nell ,Diddy handbag £5.00 Nicknots

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A selection of bright and colourful kids items currently for sale on Folksy, because not every little girl has to have pink.

Click the images for more details of the items featured, all of these sellers have many more lovely items available in their shops too so click the shop names to take a look around.

More next Thursday! Any suggestions for a theme welcome...

Tripods

Another installment in my photography tips series...

A tripod is an invaluable part of kit if you want to take good quality photographs.

It doesn't need to be anything expensive - ebay has alot for less than £10 including postage, I just checked and found mine, a Jessops TP320 for 99p + £4.99 postage. Click here for more tripods on ebay.

There are many reasons why a tripod can improve your photographs - here are a few, followed by some photographic evidence!

1. They eliminate blur from camera shake, this is especially true if you are taking close up pictures as every tiny movement is magnified.


2. They allow you to take pictures in lower or low light conditions when a longer shutter speed is required. Ideally you should not hand hold your camera at less than 1/30th of a second at the very least, and that's if you have really steady hands.


3. They allow you to adjust the aperture without having to worry about using a longer shutter speed, allowing you more control and flexibility over the final image. (I'll go into aperture/shutter speeds in a later post!)


4. You can avoid having to use a flash, especially an inbuilt flash which will produce very harsh direct light.


5. Repeatability, maximising consistency of lighting and composition which will give an online shop a more professional, slick appearance.


6. You have your hands free to hold a reflector or even be a model - as long as you have an a timer function.

The evidence...

A

B

• Photo A - Handheld, no reflector


• Photo B - Tripod, reflector held from above

Both pictures were taken indoors in a well daylit room, without any artificial lighting and using auto settings. With both photos I did my normal adjustments to brightness and contrast once I had them on my computer, I needed to brighten photo A alot more to bring it up anywhere near photo B, but no amount of brightening can make photo A have the clarity of Photo B. (I'll look at basic photo editing soon)

Shop Talk

Just had a super productive morning and got a couple of new items into my shops, I'm always a little torn as to where to put them etsy or folksy so just did one on each. My aim is to be able to update the shops at least every other day, I want the shops to look nice and full - will be making some bracelets to go on later so they should help.

I managed to spill a bag of beads all over the patio whilst taking this picture - and there's no grout in yet so it took forever to pick them all out! They're all nice and clean now and ready to be transformed!

Garden Update

We're definitely making good progress now, I chose this photo as it really captures what's going on in the garden at the moment - there's a lot of activity and dust! This is W cutting the sandstone for the new patio but you can just see the veg garden in the background and some amazing perrenials (a geranium and a michelmas daisy) which were 2" high only a few months ago, they now seem to be battling it out, they've drowned a beautiful euphorbia (pictured below) and the wildflower seed mix I scattered on the seemingly baron bare earth was obviously a waste of time - I must try and remember that next spring.

We're pretty much ready to start harvesting some cabbages now so I imagine I'll be spending quite a few evenings looking for interesting cabbage based recipes, if you have any let me know.

Is my camera good enough?

The answer is probably yes...

My old Nikon SLR 35mm camera which I paid a fortune for about 10yrs ago and had about 6 lenses, expensive flash guns, filters, light meters, massive padded bags the whole kit (I was rich before my kids came along!) It is pretty much obsolete now, it's in my attic, collecting dust but knowing how to use an SLR has really helped me to understand how to best use my compact digital camera.

I currently use a very normal 4yr old Olympus Camedia C-765, it's a very middle of the road compact camera but it has a lovely bright lens, 4 megapixels and some great manual functionality, which most digital cameras have now.

Which Functions do I really need?

Here is a list of functions that I think are really important to achieve great photos, some are vital and some you can get round by other means.

1. A 'Bright' Lens
2. 4+ Megapixels
3. Macro Settings
4. Tripod Mount
5. Self Timer
6. Manual Exposure Settings
7. Spot Metering
8. White Balance

1.) A Bright Lens ( or big aperture)

I used to sell cameras and all anyone seemed interested in was how big the zoom was, 3x, 4x, 10x - well the length is unimportant in this instance it's how big the hole is that matters! The aperture means how big the shutter opens to let in the light.

On your camera there will be two numbers by or on the lens that tell you how big the aperture is firstly when the camera is at its widest (not zooming) and secondly when it is at its full optical zoom, they will look like this 1:2.8 - 3.7 or f/2.8 - 3.7 or very similar. These numbers are called f numbers or f stops, and just to make it complicated the lower these numbers are the more light your lens can let in and capture.

Lens quality can make a huge difference in the quality of your images and the flexibility of your camera especially if light is low. There's an awful lot more to know about aperture and f-stops but I'll leave that for a later post. Think about how the pupil of your eye gets bigger and smaller in different light - it's a really important part of being able to see and focus!

2.) Megapixels - 4+ Please

The number of pixels affects the resolution of your pictures, anything above 4 is plenty! This is really important if you're going to be cropping pictures, the more mega pixels the better. Each pixel captures a little tiny dot of light on the image sensor, the more of these you have the less likely you will be able to notice them as individual pixels when you zoom in to an image (pixelation = bad). If you're buying new you'll rarely see less than 8 megapixels. If you have less than 4 you will really need to concentrate on getting your framing right so you don't have to crop the image too much, which can be a bit limiting. These beads look terribly pixelated when I crop in this close from the original image but if I had an 8 megapixel camera they may look fine.

3.) Macro Setting

This is really important if you want to take sharp close up pictures and record detail, I use mine more often than not when I'm photographing my bead kits! You can get affordable cameras with minimum (macro) focal distances of 1cm which is pretty much having the lens against the object! If your camera doesn't have a macro function it's important to know that you can't get closer than say 30cm before the image will be a blur.

4.) Tripod mount

Having the ability to attach your camera to a tripod is important as a tripod can be the difference between being able to take pictures by a window on a rainy Tuesday and having to wait for perfect wind free weather conditions so you can get outside to take your pictures. It's about flexibility and light! Even if you don't have a tripod now, you may find you need one in the future (trust me you want a tripod!) so if you're buying a new or 2nd hand camera make sure it has a tripod mount sometimes known as a tripod bush... (hee hee)

5.) Self timer

This can really help to minimise any shake. Whether you're using a tripod or you've balanced the camera on a pile of books when you press the shutter the camera may still shake or move slightly - this can alter the focus and/or cause blurring if you are pushed for light. Also, I don't often have anyone to help me take my pictures so it leaves me hands free - in this picture I was both holding a reflector and being a hand model!

6.) Manual or Aperture/Shutter Priority Exposure

This isn't essential but the flexibility that having control over the aperture (how much light is getting in) and shutter speed (in digital cameras this is how many seconds the sensor is on for to collect the light) make it a very desirable function as these settings can affect your final image so much and to an extent that can't be changed in photoshop.

On some digital cameras there are shooting modes for night, high speed action, portraits, distance and so on, they are really just pre programmed settings controlling the shutter speed and aperture for various light conditions - these are better than nothing but with a little understanding of how the aperture and shutter affect the final image it is far better to be able to control them yourself. I will cover this in a later post, at length!

7.)Spot Metering

Having the ability to change the way your camera measures light can be an extremely useful tool. Most cameras take an average light reading across the whole scene but with some cameras you can adjust this to 'spot' metering and you can also choose which spot on your picture you want to be exposed just right. If you are taking images of small objects on a white background this function really comes into it's own. with this flower (Herb Robert) the opposite is true, I wanted to ignore the dark background and record the petals so I metered accordingly.

8.)White Balance

I don't currently use a lightbox, most of the tutorials online to build one are lit by household lamps... so unless you have studio lights and you're looking into making or buying one then it's important that your camera has white balance settings and that you know how to use them. Light from household bulbs has a very warm cast, it makes whites appear yellowy or orange. Some cameras over compensate if you use the automatic settings and you can end up with a blue tinge which isn't good either, again being able to control it manually can be a real help. White balance can also be ammended when you're editing. (more on light box pro's and con's later).

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If you're buying a new camera it's well worth checking out the camera selector programme at http://www.jessops.com/

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In the next post I'll look at the kit you need for photographing your crafts, so it will be tripods, reflectors, light boxes - they're not all necessary so don't get your credit card out just yet...

Photography Tips Anyone?

Over the next few weeks I'd like to share a few simple photography tips and more specifically some advice and how to's for new craft sellers to improve their pictures. You can find links to the this series of posts in the sidebar.

I want to show you how to avoid taking pictures like this

and take more pictures like this...

Which one would you buy, ummm that's a tricky one!

I'm often on the Etsy and Folksy forums, mostly looking at people who want critiques of their shops, which I find fascinating - you get to see so many styles and tastes and it's a great way to discover new shops and pick up some good advice from seasoned sellers. I have noticed however that it's often photography that seems to be the real sticking point for alot of people. These craftsmen make beautiful items, spending hours (or days) on some of their creations only to have to translate all that painstaking work into a two dimensional showcase of just 5 pictures or 3 if you sell on Folksy!

No matter how expert you are at your craft, how lovingly and alluringly you describe your piece, not many people will notice your shop, let alone read the blurb and consider buying an item if your pictures are dark, blurred and look like they were taken for a high school project! My pictures are not the greatest by a long shot, but in the main they are sharp, bright and I feel confident that they clearly and attractively show what I've got for sale... feeling nervous now!

I'll be posting these tips regularly, and I'll try to cover as much as I can without making it too complicated. Just ask me a question if you're at all confused.

The first topic will be focussing on which functions are most useful to have on your digital camera and why, after that I'll discuss in more depth kit, lighting, focus, exposure, composition, backgrounds and anything and everything else I think a new seller may find useful including links to other helpful resources as I find them.

Time wasting and Folksy?!

It's official, I am a time waster! I've been playing around on the Etsy forums tonight and I'm worried now about the addictive quality of becoming an online seller - I read this post the other day from Ellebelle in the Etsy blog and it made me think, ummm perhaps I need to prioritise my time before it's too late! The t-shirt reads Etsy Orphan!

Exciting news! A few days ago a fellow blogger who bought one of my bead kits gave me a mention in her blog! She also has a Folksy shop, http://www.folksy.com/shops/SewScrumptious and was my first Folksy sale, her blog is called sew scrumptious, and well worth a visit - Here's one of her lovely aprons, she also makes really cute crayon rolls.

I'm going to make links to more shops on Folksy to help promote us Brits as Folksy is a very sleepy baby brother in comparisson with the loud teenage rantings of Etsy, so will try and feature other sellers items here on a weekly basis. Will give me agood excuse to go window shopping!

Mini Purse

The mini coin purse is not yet a resounding success, it needs some tweaking but I thought I'd post some pics to show it's development so far... it is tiny, but big enough for a £2 coin and a 50p. I've got so many ideas for how it could be used, emergency paracetemol, trolley pound, parking money, pocket money holder for a child, attach to a book bag for school money (E's are regularly after a quid here and there for various events), earrings and rings - there are all sorts of reaons why a little pouch with a clip would be useful for young and old! I need to think of a cute name for it... ?

Lesson learnt today was that you can't take good photos with a toddler around - I gave up in the end and let him have it!

The shops are doing well, so I desperately need to make more stock (shouldn't really be playing around with mini purses!) Here are a couple of little parcels ready to be posted one to Israel and the other the Peak District! And of course twitter in the background!