Pillowcase Skirts - Re-do and Vintage Dress

My pictures of the pillowcase skirts I made and of the vintage dress were so bad I decided I had to take advantage of the somewhat warmer weather and redo them. So the mannequin and I went outside (this time she was wearing a cropped tank top of mine that I used to wear when I did kickboxing that I had forgotten about) and had a little photoshoot. The pics still aren't great, but are an improvement.

Since pics on etsy work best if the pictures are square as the thumbnails are automatically cropped to a square shape, I decided to fill in a lot of the extra space on the sides with text and such. And it was fun to be a little more artistic by doing that...it reminds me a bit of a pic in magazine this way...although I guess it's really not.

If you look close you may see the wall looks a little funny because I fudged that with The GIMP (a program similar to PhotoShop)...the wall isn't that big in real life, so it was duplicated in order to help make the image square and not a rectangle.

I didn't do that with the picture of the vintage dress though. I do have another picture of it close up that is cropped to a square though, so at least that one shows up to better advantage on etsy.

But overall the lighting is better. And the background is better sort of (you can see the light colored fabric better against this blue than you could against the white I used before)...and it looks kind of rustic rather than like just blah regular walls with some patches of paint that does not quite match (which I never really noticed until I photographed the wall).

Hopefully it will help these items sell faster.

So that's what I did today. Fun. Now I'm off to a meeting I'd rather not go to, but I'll be dutiful and go do it anyway.

Game of Love?

Today I tried my hand at creating my first downloadable, digital collage art sheet for people to use in their art collage, scrapbooking, cardmaking, etc. and try to list it for sale at etsy.com and shophandmade.com. I priced it for a teeny bit less at shophandmade since they don't charge me anything to list with them (for now anyway).

The idea for it is based on some vintage Bingo cards I have. But instead of saying Bingo, these say LUCKY, DREAM, ADORE, and SWEET on them instead of BINGO. All four "cards" come on one jpg image 8 1/2 by 11 inch in size.

Kinda cute, neh? Would be nice for Valentine's Day maybe. I'll have to try making some altered art collage or something with them myself.

I have some ink jet transparency sheets that are meant to be used with overhead projectors. I'm thinking of maybe printing this out onto that and doing something creative that way. But I don't know for sure what I'll do. But whatever it is, it will be ingenious, I tell you, or my name isn't Ebenezer...uhm, well my name isn't that...never mind.

Suddenly etsy...

I've finally got around to listing a very few things on etsy.com again. (If you're by any chance interested in checking the items out you can click on the pics and they should take you to my etsy shop).

First are some vintage bingo cards and markers that I've managed to successfully sell on etsy before. The red (alright, it's kind of orange), white, and blue coloring makes them fun for any body wanting to use them for an Americana themed collage art.




Next I have some vintage and very kawaii (that's Japanese for cute) hair barrettes, with yellow kitty cats, turquoise strawberries, pink apples, blue stars, and peach hearts. I think they'd be great for someone who's into the Japanese Street Fashion look or any other funky style. or of course you could be normal and just give them to a sweet little girl to wear in her hair.




And last (for now), a funky vintage beaded purse almost just like one I remember from my childhood.



I have a confession to make regarding the beaded purse...the one like this that we had when I was a little kid, only it was bright orange...well I used to pick the plastic beads off of them and chew them...hey I was four or five. I chewed on those little pegs from the "You sunk my battleship!" game too. This may only paritally account for why I am so weird today.

That's all I've listed for today, but there will be more later. In fact, you might see somethings I actually made myself, and not just vintage things. Something more shabby chic like even maybe.