Saturday 21 April 2018

Japanese mirror ball challenge In WOOL!



Have you seen the trend just now? Making a polished mirror ball from aluminium foil. Roll it into a ball and hit it thousands of times to form a smooth dense ball, then sanding and polishing

But I thought this would be a great fun challenge for needle felting, to look at how the reflections and light and shade work to make a shape look super reflective 

And I think it actually turned out quite well :) - dare I say better than some of the tin foil balls :)

But I think its a great project to work on for needle felting to try and see if we can add even more dimensions to a piece with a little extra shading 

In something reflective like eyes in 2d and 3d needle felted works 

I actually learnt a lot about shading and highlights learning to sketch with the pro marker pens

Which you can see in the different levels in black needed to make this black Lab sketch 


Wednesday 11 April 2018

A needle felted PomPom Mushroom


A friend of mine recently mentioned that I haddnt done any pom pom needle felted tutorials for a while
And for some reason I couldnt get the idea of a mushroom out of my head

Being brave I just went with the idea and didnt know until I cut it open if the pattern would work, if I would have nicely spaced out spots or just a mess

Its really easy too

Side 1 of maker

make 3 evenly spaced out semicircles in white
Cover everything in a few layers of red
In the dips beside where the white semicircles are make two circles in white
fill with red

Side 2
Fill with white - dont overfill

Cut open and tie off

Felt up one layer of white into red to make underside of mushroom
felt down remaining white to become a stalk

Trim the cap of the mushroom



How easy is this?

Tuesday 10 April 2018

How to use photography to boost views on Etsy

In this weeks Etsy tips video 'Love a Loser'


I talk about taking a listing that isnt doing well and showcasing it for a month to see if you can boost things

One of the changes I made to my little needle felted yorkshire terrier was thinking about the images

Obviously this is a custom listing so there is little I can do to actually reshoot the dog (he was sold ages ago)
But it is SO SO important that an image catches the eye. Even if I can get him to the front page for a search term if he dosent catch the eye of shoppers then no-one will click, no-one will pin share love interact with or buy

So I had a go at trying to make him pop just using photoshop 

This was the original photograph, at the time I was super happy with this, his expression is great and its a fairly crisp photo, I like the slightly blurred kennel in the background 
But of course over time I have learnt more and styles change so I see plenty faults in this

First of all the background is not properly white - it has a pink tinge - and the colours are not saturated, it is a bit washed out
I like there are some pops of colour with the kennel roof in green and the dogs pink tongue 

But to stand out things have to pop

So first of all I tried this, I lightened the background to make it properly white and I did actually intensify the colours. Then as red is very eye catching I tried this border
But honestly although the red draws the eye it draws the eye only to the border and the image looks even more washed out - so new plan 

So this time I kept some of the red for the eye catching - but added a paw print border - just to stand out from all the other listings. I also upped the saturation of all the colours and sharpened the image up some more
What do you think? He is not perfect, I am still learning but hopefully this catches the eye a little more without insulting the eye :)





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