What a difference...

...Photoshop can make! Check out these before and after shots:

The one on the left is the original. The one on the right is much closer to the actual colour of the fabric.

A narrow slice of light

As I've said before, I struggle with how to take pictures of hand woven fabric. I want them for my own records, of course, but I also need good photos to put on the shop website, on the photo frame we have on the counter in the shop, for marketing and advertising, on my blog, etc. etc. It's tricky to get a picture that shows off an item well, shows off the woven structure, shows off the particular features of the item you want to showcase, etc. etc.

Last time I mentioned photography, Peg pointed me to David Taylar Daniel's blog and I've since spent a lot of time enjoying his posts and inspecting his beautiful pictures for clues. I absolutely love this one from this post, and am very intrigued by this one from this post, too.¹ I particularly like the way the second one looks like he's just dangled the scarf from a height and dropped it into a pile.

Of course, one of the things that make David's pictures so beautiful is the lighting and one of my biggest problems with photography is that my house has very little light - a sad fact that has meant the death of many houseplants since we moved here. There are only two windows that get much light: the bedroom and the office, neither of which is suited for taking pictures. My dining room window gets a fair bit of indirect light for a narrow slice of the day, so that's where and when I take most pictures.

Another site that gave me some great tips about how to set things up is this one, one of Caro's many great tutorials over on splityarn. Her setup is pretty much exactly what I've been using lately, except that mine's on the seat of the chair to get it up closer to the window instead of down on the floor.

I finished the flannel binding on the first baby blanket last night and today I wanted to take some pictures. I missed the narrow slice of light but I went ahead anyway and this time, after doing the usual shots with the blanket arranged in the usual way, I tried David's drop-into-a-puddle trick.

Here's the entire puddle from the front...


...and from the side.


The front one shows off the binding well but doesn't do much for me otherwise. The side one is a bit more interesting but it's too busy and there's too much other stuff cluttering up the frame.

Next I pulled in really tight from the side and got a picture I'm really happy with:



The colours aren't very accurate because of the lack of light but I really like the narrow focal depth and the way the fabric curves. Of course, it doesn't show off the flannel binding, nor show the entire piece so it's not really a good product shot but I think it'll work well in other places. I still need to play with it in Photoshop a bit to see if I can correct the colours but even as it is I quite like it. I forsee more puddles in my future!

The ones I took before the puddle attempt show off the binding better. Here's a close up...



...and a draped-over-the-chair shot:



I'd be very curious to know which shot(s) other people prefer, so I added a poll to the sidebar over there on the right.². You can pick more than one if you like a couple of them. Please vote!

NB: To really see the photos well, you've got to click on the picture and see it in its own window at full size. They lose some quality when they get squashed into the frame on the blog page. The puddle close up, for instance, looks blurry on my monitor when I look at it inside the blog, but when I click it into its own window it looks quite sharp.

1. Holy cow! Sorry for the many links but there doesn't appear to be way to link directly to the pictures I mean inside their respective posts and I didn't want to put David's images on my own blog, nor give them to you completely out of context.

2. Of course, it's going to sit there long after this post has scrolled to the bottom and I haven't figured out a way to put a link back to the post from the poll gadget. Meh, what can you do?

---

Update: The poll has closed! Puddle side and Binding close up got one vote each (16%), Puddle close up got two (33%), and Draped over chair got four (66%).

True confessions time: I considered only relaying the percentages so that it would look like heaps and heaps of people voted, but of course it is quality rather than quantity that counts. HFD is like the Vinyl Cafe: We may not be big, but we're small!

Thanks to everyone who voted!

Gonna Get My Flannel On

Finally got to the store and got some flannel to trim the baby blankets with:



Am very anxious to get it into the wash so I can try out my enormous 1" wide bias tape maker. Will keep you posted... (ha!)

WebCam 01.08.09

Here's what's on the big loom right now:



They're baby blankets done using 8/8 cotton for both warp and weft (tho I might use 4/8 for the weft on the last one just to compare fabric weights). This is a bit heavier than the baby blanket in my last post; I used a 4/8 cotton boucle in the weft for that one. I'm planning to finish off the ends of these with cotton flannel. There's a sale on flannel prints at my local fabric store right now, too - yay for fortuitous timing! I'm also looking forward to using my spanky (but rather scary looking) new bias tape maker that makes tape 1" wide, which is what I used on all four edges of the other blanket.

I'm just about done with blanket #3 of 4. I used a light green for the weft in this one, which I quite like:



I used a slightly darker green with a bluer cast for the one before this and didn't like it as much. Still nice, but I prefer the lighter colours. I used a light blue for the first one and it was oh, SO nice. Too bad I didn't snap a pic of that one, eh wot? Not sure yet what to use for #4. Considering yellow, considering natural, considering another of the pretty, pretty light blues... I've still got another 14" or so to decide, but I want to get these done tonight or in the morning so that I can pick up the fabric while I'm out tomorrow afternoon.

Gonna Get My Fibre On

Woosh. Okay, so 2008 did not go quite as imagined fibrologically speaking. It ended well, though, and 2009 is looking very rosey indeed!
So here's a sampling of what I'm working on now.

First, some sewing, which is very exciting because I'm finally starting to feel like I'm figuring it out. I got Amy Karol's book, Bend the Rules Sewing, from a friend for Christmas, which is totally cool 'cause I've been reading Amy's blog for ages now unbeknownst to my friend. Anyway, in the book Amy suggests using cotton flannel fabric for interfacings, which got me thinking of cotton flannel in a whole new way, i.e. as more than my favourite sets of sheets. I had a chunk of handwoven fabric that I'd planned to turn into a baby blanket, so I got some flannel am edging it with that. Looks pretty good, if I do say so myself!



I had a few tiny scraps left over from making the edging, and I've been cursing the lack of unpinned real estate in my tomato pincushion, so I whipped up this little guy, too.



Maybe it's just me, but I think it's almost unnecessarily cute. Plus I'm quite taken with the way that the pins coordinate with the fabric, without any planning whatsoever on my part. It is also the first thing I have ever made in a totally spur of the moment, "Huh, I could use one of those, I think I'll make one. Oh, look, it's done and now I've got the thing I wanted and hey, wasn't that easy!?" kind of way and also without any kind of adult supervision. Very exciting! AND it's the first pic I've taken using my latest camera/lighting/backdrop scheme which I am quite pleased with, so what's not to like?

There are some full sized (24") pillows as well, which I may try to take some pics of later but they won't fit in my new photo setup and I'm too lazy to take the camera off the tripod and make the bed and all that.

Lest you think that I'm only sewing with commercial fabrics, here are a couple more recent projects. A stash of new eyepillows for a local yoga teacher...


...and a little drawstring bag that I actually made a few months ago and have been using ever since.



I'm not totally happy with the interfacing in it - used the heaviest iron on stuff I could find, which turned out to be fusible fleece, so the bag is pretty stiff and the cord doesn't pull up as it should. I'll use flannel in the next one and see how that works!

So that's the sewing. I am also knitting, for the first time in years. I am quite enjoying myself and it's lovely to have some little thing to do while e.g. waiting for my honey at the doctor's office. I have also found that I am no longer horrified by the thought of using little needles; used to be that anything smaller than a size 7 was simply Not Worth My Time, but I've just ordered some size 1 needles for socks and am quite anxious for them to arrive. Here are the socks I'm working on now, using needles much too large with coils that simply won't unbend, so there's been a fair amount of swearing involved:



There were also a couple of hats knit for Christmas presents, one for my father in law (the first thing I'd knit by hand in 15!! years!!) which required zero (0) swearing at all, and another for Ron that I've dubbed the muffin-top owing to its rather bizarre design. That one required a small amount of swearing when it became clear that the hat was too big so I had to tear out all the ribbing at the bottom, pick up the stitches and knit it back down. Still, not so bad. Now if he'd just wear the darn thing, I'd be happy.


Oh, and there's a scarf on the go as well. It was the first thing I started (on a lark, at the Unspun Heroes Christmas potluck, 'cause someone had decided we should all knit that evening rather than spin. Hmph.) Of all my projects, this one has required the most swearing because I keep forgetting to pay attention during the lace-making row and wind up with less stitches than when I started. Still, I am persevering and have about 30" done.



I think I'll have to slow down on the knitting front, sadly, as I have definitely noticed a return of the ol' carpal tunnel syndrome which I got in the first place when I added knitting to my signing-all-day and typing-all-night routine back in the early 90's. I'd hoped that it wouldn't bother my wrists now since I'm neither signing nor typing nearly as much but it does still seem to aggravate it. So... I either have to slow down and work at it a little at a time or binge-knit (my usual MO), blow out my wrists and then give it up entirely for another 15 years. That doesn't appeal, so I'm going to try to take it easy. I'm sure there's a new year's resolution in there somewhere.

So that's sewing and knitting. There's been a fair amount of weaving in the past couple months (and the past couple days, for that matter) but I'll save that for my next post. Trying not to binge and fast on the blogging, too!