Artfire UK Guild

I am a member of the Artfire UK Guild and today I thought I would show you some of the members of that Guilds work, as well as explain why being a member of a Guild can benefit your business if you sell handmade goods.

The Mouse House

BlueBoxStudio

For those of you that are unsure what a Guild is, it is traditionally an organisation that represents a particular trade, such as carpenters or brick layers and were used to pass on skills and to keep standards of work high within that trade. If you had a Guild membership people perceived you as masters of your craft which invariably increased your chances of work.

The Vintage Artist

With Hugs and Kisses

The Handmade movement has taken on the idea of Guilds, sometimes to gather together people of the same craft, sometimes to gather people that craft from one area of the world. The Artfire UK Guild, as the name suggests, is a collection of sellers of handmade, vintage and supplies from the UK that sell through Artfire. Our mission statement is to encourage all our members to be the best they can be, so they and their businesses can thrive in a very tough market place. To that aim, we support each other, pool our knowledge and encourage each other to learn, improve and expand our knowledge of our own chosen line of work.

Blue Shed Craft

Pirate Pixie Crew

You can see all the shops of our Guild members here. Please do take a look around and see all we have to offer. If you are selling through Artfire and live in the UK we would welcome you to join the Guild. Just fill out the application form. You can find our Guild on Facebook too.

Some more new lines in the Pirate Pixie Crew Shop

It seems like I am going to be listing for a while in the Pirate Pixie Crew Shop, because I can't seem to stop coming up with more ideas of goods to make! I hope you like today's offerings.

So Who Doesn't love a bit of bunting?

Peas Please! These wee amigurumi peas are just the start of a full range of vegetables.

And lastly for today, we have Yoga/Dance socks. I wear these type of socks when hoop dancing.

More new goods to follow soon, that is if I have the time. Life is getting very busy at the moment. 

So I've added new lines to my shop

Over the last few months I have been experimenting with yarn and coming up with new products using different techniques. Felting is one of the main things I have been trying out. I purchased a pattern for making a felted hat and it all began... After mixing up ideas for what I wanted to create with methods of production and sources of materials, I came up with a range of top hats, from full sized to mini hair fascinator sized. Here are some examples of what I have made. You can see many of them for sale in my shop.

Rainbow striped mini top hat.

Mini purple feather and dread top hat

Full sized green top hat

Mini Purple, blue and green top hat

Mini teal bowler hat

I'm now learning to spin and dye my own yarn, so that new project can be, from beginning to end, totally handmade by me. From the sheep to the shop!

It's been a while...

... since I posted here. There are many reasons, for not keeping up the daily blog, too many to go into. I see that people still come here and check out the blog, as people still comment on posts from years ago. I thought I would come and post up a few of the hand made things I have been working on lately. I have gone monster mad!

This is Captain Von Strong, or Strongy to his friends. He is a circus strongman with tattoos on his arms.

This is my Zombie Monster. His brain is popping out of his head, his right eyeball has fallen from it's socket and his right arm bone is sticking out after another zombie mistook his arm for a cucumber and ate it.

This is the Dreadhead Family. You can read all about them in my shop.

The beautiful Squidy is a soft cuddly cephalopod that's looking for a new home.

Michê is a very small yeti that has a sad tale to tell. Head over to her page to find out why.

Do you want a pocket monster? Then Teenieweenie is the monster for you. He's the last one I'll show you, but there are many more already in my shop and waiting to be listed.

Thanks for reading this blog. I will try to post a bit more, but I don't think I will ever go back to posting daily. I just don't have the time any more. If you make handmade goods and would like your shop reviewed, do leave a comment here with a link and I will do my best to stop by and have a look.

Photography Tutorials: Food

Selling baked goods online is almost as challenging as selling art: how do you make a customer fall in love with your cookies when they can’t smell them baking or see their yummy goodness in person? The answer, as always, is in the photography.

This was a tough assignment, but someone had to do it! I asked Tracy, the owner of Once Upon a Cookie (who, by the way, bakes the most ridiculously delicious cookie that you’ll ever eat in your life) to “lend” me a few samples to shoot for this tutorial.

In my humble opinion, the best images are the ones that let the cookies speak for themselves. No props, no busy background, no weird staging. These are cookies. You eat them. End of story.

1. Resist the temptation to photograph from far away. Get up close, use the macro function on your camera, and show people just how yummy these things really are.



2. Get creative with the layout. Shoot in a way that makes your product interesting, yet still shows the detail.



3. This happened quite by accident, but I’m certainly grateful to my two-year-old for showing me another great way to photograph food. A chubby little hand grabbing the cookie is a perfect way to show the scale of the item (Tracy’s cookies are mammoth, by the way) and gets the point across - these are too good to resist!



Keep your background clean and white (colours are distracting and the wrong ones can actually be unappetizing), find a natural light source, and get up close and personal with your food!

(I don’t know what happened to Tracy’s cookies after this photo shoot. They seem to have disappeared. How very odd...)

Written my Michelle of MKCPhotography