Wlydhare's Hollow

Hands of Hope

My sister, Beth, is such an inspiration to me! She has started a non-profit group called Hands of Hope which works in conjunction with Girl-Child Network Worldwide

 

I suppose it would help to explain the Girl-Child Network Worldwide first. They are an organization working with girls in African countries who are victims of abuse, human trafficking and/or rape  to help them transform into survivors and leaders. GCNW builds centers which provide education, medical care, legal assistance and police protection.

My sister started Hands of Hope to use needlework (her huge passion!) to help in this process. Kits are put together of embroidery hoops, floss, needles, scissors, cloth, etc. and then sent to the GCNW centers in Africa. There, interested girls are taught embroidery skills and will practice with the provided kit. With guidance they are then taught design basics and work to create an embroidery design of their own which represents something special to them.

 

When the design is completed, it will be sent back to Hands of Hope, where my sister will make kits to sell using the girl’s design. All proceeds will then be sent back to that girl, to help her gain the means to seek an education, starting a business or similar goals which will improve her life.

Beth runs an Etsy store where she sells hand-crafted items (she is SO talented) and then pours all profits into the supplies for her charity.

 

As you may recall, I am running a fledgling machine embroidery business called E’Bellish. Beth is my first customer, well guinea pig, because while I an donating my time and work to Hands of Hope, she has had to wait for me to learn what I am doing! LOL!  Doing a machine embroidery design from scratch may sound simple, but I have been working on it for over a month now. It required learning all sorts of things from creating vector graphics; providing the machine with instructions to compensation with the stretch of fabrics; and engineering the most effective order to stitch the design to reduce thread count, time and  distortion.

 

This weekend everything has been coming together and it is SO exciting! Beth has been sending out sponsorship requests and just learned on Friday that Janlynn Corporation (a national company which makes and sells needlework kits) wishes to be a long term sponsor and partner with Hands of Hope. I did a happy dance because I finally pulled it all together and successfully created and stitched out the logo for Hands of Hope. And finally, one of the items in the Hands of Hope Etsy store made the front page the Etsy site today, as a featured item!

How cool is all that? I am so, so proud of Beth and I hope you might take a moment to visit her website which further explains her vision Oh by the way, if you are interested in helping, she is currently running a contest with prizes for anyone who helps out.

 

 

Fun with Photos

Well I knew there would be some bumps in the road when I started my Etsy store, but I didn't think in would be in the area of photos. While I am not the best photographer in the world, I had thought I at least had sufficient ability to come up with some acceptable photos for the site.

I suppose knowing that a sale, or even getting someone to click on an item to just look at it, hinged on the quality of the thumbnail photo they found at my site. Take that pressure and add my obsessive compulsive nature and you have the perfect formula for many hours of frustration with a digital camera.

First I tried to just set up shots in my work room, against a drape of fabric. This seemed to work okay for larger items but my necklaces just didn't show up right. The background didn't look white, they were too dark, the shadows were not behaving and even several hours playing with them in a photo editor could not get the colors to look like a proper representation of the design.

So then I got a photo cube and lighting to try to see if a more professional set up would help, but I continued to have the same problems with the background looking anything but white. *arghh*

I then thought that perhaps using my bunny Lily (made by the very talented Lollihop) to model the necklaces might be cool and a bit different, but tie into my studio name. But when I ran it by other people, everyone agreed Lily was adorable, but confusing as to what exactly was for sale. K.I.S.S. - Keep it simple stupid! Well no one was that blunt, but that was the bottom line.

Okay, plan C, or is it D now? Someone suggested scrap booking paper as a background, but I still thought the pictured needed something else to it, that didn't distract from what was being sold. Then at 3 am it came to me, something nature-like: river rocks, a tree branch, something along those lines. So today I went on a hunt and found a wonderful branch out in the firewood pile! Woohoo! I draped a necklace over it and I really liked how it looked! But there was still the problem of the background.

A soft beige was too light and washed out.

A sandy background was too much and took away from the necklace and sort of made it all run together in shades of brown.

Then, much like Goldilocks, I finally found one that was just right!

My stubborn OCD brain is happy and I was able to post a bunch of new necklaces! Yeah! Now I just need to go back to the previously posted necklaces and "upgrade" their photos.