Space Invaders
I pick up lots of small items at sales, and I have always had a pretty vivid imagination. I like to create creatures out of objects. The TV tubes are the perfect example. At one point you have just TV tubes, (which are really pretty amazing works of art by themselves), but if you put eyes on them, you give them a personality. And if you give the creatures a landscape, you have a whole story. It’s true, one picture is worth a thousand words.
-Cheri
I wanted a chair to put next to the back door in my mud room/laundry room/entry way if I needed to set something down or take off my shoes. This chair was my great-grandmother’s, a vanity chair that is part of a bedroom set. It has been up in the guest bedroom doing duty as a bedside table, and it’s just the chair I’ve been wanting for the mud room.
I put that brown upholstery fabric on five or six years ago, and it’s worn and too drab. I just wanted to do a quick and dirty upholstery job.
First things first, I removed the screws to take the chair seat off. This chair seat is a good example of why perfectionism isn’t always necessary. My previous upholstery job wasn’t that great. Two of the four screws holding the seat on were missing, and many of the staples holding the fabric on had loosened. It still looked fine and held together. Imperfection works!
Normally, you would use poly batting for upholstery, but when I did the first job I just used what I had around, which was Warm and Natural quilt batting. I put a layer of muslin over it to protect the batting, and it made this job really easy.
Here you can see most of the stapling of the new fabric. The print is random, so I lined the grain of the canvas up with the front edge of the seat. The fabric is a vintage paisley canvas from an auction years ago.
Turning the corner properly is the hardest part, but it doesn’t have to be perfect. Cut away any excess to make it easier to fold.
To make reattaching the seat easier, put the chair upside down on a table.
Here’s the finished product!
And here is the chair in the room. I still have a few things to do, including finishing the baseboards, so watch for upcoming posts on this room.
For a really detailed explanation of chair seat upholstery, see this excellent guide from one of my favorite blogs, Design Sponge. The tool list given may seem a bit intimidating, but don’t let that stop you. I only needed a flat and a phillips screwdriver, staple gun, scissors, and water bottle (to keep a cat off my project!).
-Loryn
Loryn came to B-ton this weekend to help me get started taking jewelry pictures for my etsy shop. Photography class couldn’t start until I had the tools and environment under control. I had to clean up the are and get the photo table set-up. I have an old drafting table which has become my base, the lights are borrowed from Loryn, the camera is my old Fuji Film 3800 FinePix, and I bought a roll of banner paper from Pygmalion’s, the local art store.
Living in an A-Frame house can cause some difficulties in hanging anything from the walls, so to hang my banner paper which would become my photo backdrop, I purchased two closet rod brackets. I hung these from the walls and put a dowel though the roll of paper. This drapes down to the table and provides a great backdrop that I can replace easily and even write and doodle on with no costly consequences. Just cut and roll out another sheet and you are good to go.
Then came the actual tutorial.
—Kristin
Loryn here. This is what the full photography set-up looks like. After shooting thousands of objects for sale on eBay, I got the best results by having two lights balanced on each side of the object. The tripod is helpful, but not a necessity with Kristin’s camera, which has good image stabilization.
The power strip has to be close at hand (or foot, really), so we can turn the lights off and on easily. The photo lights are 500 watt daylight bulbs. They are very, very hot, and they have a 5 hour lifespan, so you only want them on while shooting. A truly professional set-up would include lights that are slaved to the camera, so they only come on when you press the shutter release. We’re not there yet, if we will ever be.
Here I’m trying out different positions for the camera and the jewelry. The camera has a 6X zoom, so it needs to be fairly close to get nice tight macro shots.
I’ve always thought that product photography is similar to taking portraits. Every object has a “face,” even just metaphorically, and a close up of that face is the shot you want for your thumbnails. Here is the “face shot” of Kristin’s pearl necklace:
Didn’t Kristin do a beautiful job designing this? She let me wear it when I got married, and it looked wonderful with my pink dress.
After the face shot, I pull back for the complete object. With necklaces, the challenge is to get the item to fill most of the frame, instead of a mostly white shot. It’s easier with a multi-strand necklace like this.
After a few adjustments in Photoshop, the photos are ready to go! Check out the next post for more of Kristin’s jewelry!
—Loryn
the crafty sisters 