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 

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?

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 :)