rose hip

big smiles...

 

...on my face throughout the week while reading all your lovely comments to my pillowcase giveaway... Thank you to all of you who participated in the giveaway with so many sweet words (Wow!); I was also so pleased to see that a good number of you were first-time commenters (Yay!). I do hope you had a bit of fun choosing your favourite pillowcase(s); I sure had fun seeing which ones you favoured the most (#18 got the most votes followed very closely by #2 and #1). Because of the number of comments I received, I though it would be only fitting to give away two pillowcases instead of one, and so, as picked by my trusty random number generator, the two winners are:

 

Frances

and

Heather (who pens the lovely blog, my little red suitcase)

 

Congratulations to both of you and I hope you will enjoy your pillowcases! Thank you to all of you for popping by today and I hope to be back in a few days to show you what I've been up to lately...

 

the pillowcase giveaway...

...that I've been blabbing on about for the last while is finally on and all you have to do to enter is leave a comment to this post between now and midnight, Tuesday, November 26; also, if you have a favourite or favourites in this batch, tell me which one(s) by referring to the number in the bottom left corner of the photo(s). (I will assume it's the one in the foreground unless you say otherwise.) Even though there are 18 photos, there are actually 17 different pillowcases to choose from as Photo 17 has pillowcases that are already in the other photos. If you'd like to see more photos of the pillowcases, you can find some if you scroll down to some of my recent posts, as well as in my Etsy shop in the listed and sold sections.

This giveaway is a very special one for me because it's one little way I can say thank you to all of you who keep visiting my blog (even in the lean moments in the past year when my posts where very infrequent!) as well as to all of you who have supported my Etsy shop over the years, enough so that I reached 500 sales recently!... Your loyalty and support mean the world to me because they inspire me to keep exploring my creative side, making something out of the jumble of crafty ideas that always seem to fill my head... So, a big THANK YOU to all of you lovely readers and Etsy customers and, if you've never commented before, please don't be shy!

 

 

new pillowcases (part 4)...

 

...Well, it's really only one new pillowcase made with a very scrumptious Denyse Schmidt floral print; I was immediately smitten by this print when it first came out, and I eventually caved in and bought it because I just couldn't be without it! (I say "caved in" because I paid more for it than I usually pay for fabric and, while I'm on the subject of the cost of cotton fabric, have you not noticed how it's become more expensive in the last little while?!) I also bought it in a slightly different colour stream, but I still have to find the right colour of yarn to trim it with...

 

I have a couple more pillowcases in my "violet-blue series" that I have yet to trim, but I think I'll leave these for later because I am so ready for a pillowcase giveaway and I hope you are as well, dear readers! So, I'm inviting you to pop by early next week because I'll have it set up by then... In the meantime, have yourself a great weekend and thanks so much for your visits and your lovely comments!

 

 

 

new pillowcases (part 3)...

 

...For my third little pillowcase batch, I thought I'd show you some blues and darker colours. I'm absolutely in love with the top fabric (from the Sis Boom collection, Happy Land) and I had a lot of fun playing around with different yarn colours for the trim; I finally chose a lovely cotton yarn in a burgundy-like colour which tends towards a pretty mauve-violet in dimmer light (not like in these photos!). When I look at this finished pillowcase, it makes me think of something either Mexican because it's so bright and lively, or, closer to my Polish roots, something Eastern European (think Russian floral wool shawls)... What do you think?

The top fabric in the photo above and in the two photos below is a favourite of mine that has been in my stash forever, probably because I've never wanted to cut into it... (You must have special fabric like that in your stash as well, right?!) It's a vintage Amy Butler from one of her first collections and, I remember when I first saw it, I couldn't believe how lovely its design and colours were! However, "enough is enough" I told myself, I have to use it because it's much too pretty to be lying around collecting dust in the shadows and, well, I do also have to make room for some newer fabric!...

 

To round up this little lot is a pillowcase in a sweet ditsy floral with a black background and trimmed by a light blue cotton yarn. Given that I can't get enough of ditsy florals at the moment (see my post here) and that I find they are so good at complementing bold florals like the one above, I certainly couldn't do without one here, could I?! I have one more new pillowcase post coming up very soon and then I think it's high time for a pillowcase giveway... Thanks for popping by and I hope you've enjoyed this little post!

new pillowcases (part 2)...

 

 

...I so appreciate all your comments to my last post; I feel like I've touched a "common nerve" about all that photo-fiddling we all seem to do when blogging! I have to say that most of what I've learnt about taking photos is all down to trial and error; being able to take so many photos of a single subject with my digital camera so quickly probably allows me to get better at it, despite it being very time-consuming once I start browsing through all the photos. I often tell myself that I should take a course in photography or at least pick up a book about it but, honestly, photography doesn't really stand a chance in my world because I much prefer to use my time crafting and trying out all the many crafty ideas I have!...

I don't know if you're at all like me, but this is usually my approach when I take photos for my blog or my Etsy shop: I shoot as many photos of my subject as it takes for me to I feel that I have some that I can turn into decent photos with a bit of tweaking with my photo-editor (usually playing with the light and colours). When I take all these photos, I'm always trying different angles with respect too my light source and I take them in little batches, uploading them onto my computer as I go along so I can look at them on my big screen. In the last little while, I've been using PicMonkey for all my basic editing because it's fast and easy to use and, for more advanced editing, I fall back on Photoshop Elements. Do you have any photo editors that you would recommend?

 

 

I have to admit that I played around with the photos of the floral pillowcase with the white background you see in this post for quite a while; the white of the fabric is a very pure white and my photos always seemed like the white was coming out either too blue or too yellow. Even as I look at the actual pillowcase while I'm writing this post, the colours of the flowers in the photos seem too red and not blue enough, but I guess the light is dim and grey today as it's raining and I took these photos on a sunny bright day when colours naturally look less blue. Anyhow, whether the flowers on it are slightly more red or blue, I do like the fabric of this pillowcase; it's a bit different than the fabrics I tend to use for my pillowcases because it's more lightweight and softer to the touch and it has a nice weave to it when you look at it closely (which none of the photos in this post have captured!). For more pillowcase talk, I will be back with another batch this weekend so I hope you will pop by... Thanks for the visit!

 

 

new pillowcases (part 1)...

 

...Since my last post, I have been spending a fair amount of time taking photos of my new pillowcase batch and then editing these photos. I find that taking photos at this time of the year is always a bit tricky since, with shorter periods of daylight, the quality of the light on a sunny day changes really quickly, going from more yellow-toned to white to blue in a flash; I feel like I always have to be ready to pounce with my camera! I guess because I sell my pillowcases online, I'm sensitive to trying to get my photos to accurately represent the colours of the fabrics and yarns in them as much as possible, at least as seen on my computer monitor. Obviously, the pillowcases look different in natural daylight and artificial light, but I'm always aiming to have a more neutral light in the photos, more white than yellow or blue, which I find can be a real challenge with shorter days which are often grey around here and, even when the sun is out, the light seems more golden than white.




So, it seems that when I shoot my pillowcases I end up taking a zillion photos and spending a zillion hours playing around with them with a photo editor! As much as I like digital cameras -- and aren't they essential to blogging?! -- I have to learn to restrain myself a bit and not take a thousand photos of a batch of pillowcases which -- because I tend to be thorough with stuff like this -- I end up looking at frame after frame! And then often, while loading them onto Etsy or Typepad, I find myself still tweaking them because I find that both these sites have a way of slightly altering a photo when it's uploaded... Have you noticed that?




All this to tell you that, because I took so many photos of this last pillowcase batch, I thought that, instead of trying to jam them all into one very long post, I would show them to you in a few shorter posts throughout the next few days; in this way I can work on getting my photos blog-ready in a few spurts instead of one very long editing session which tends to make me rather photo-weary by the end of it all! So, I hope you've enjoyed Part 1 and I hope you pop by for Part 2, either tomorrow or the day after...