I love working with sterling silver. It's beautiful, classic and best of all, quality. But as with any silver product, it will tarnish over time and with exposure to air, light and skin oils. This can be a frustrating process, watching your lovely pieces of shiny silver turn brown. I became quite frustrated with it myself, both with my finished jewelry and with my sterling wire supply, so I researched sterling silver polishing on the internet.
You can use regular silver polish on it, but I have sensitivities to chemical products like that, so I searched further for a more natural solution, and found two.
The first is a slightly more complicated method, but works very well in a hands-off fashion.
-Line the inside of a small bowl with tin foil.
-Put 1 tsp each of salt and baking soda into the bottom of the bowl.
-Fill it with tap water as hot as you can run it, stirring to dissolve the salt and baking soda.
-Add your sterling jewelry to the solution, making sure that the pieces are touching the tin foil as well as each other.
-Leave for about 5 minutes, then pour off the hot water and rinse well. Pat dry.
The second method is more time consuming, depending on how many pieces you're polishing, and it requires more hands-on involvement, but it seems to last longer and is, in my opinion, superior.
-Pour a bit of baking soda onto a plate.
-Make your fingers wet and dip them into the baking soda.
-Rub the paste gently on the sterling silver until it's shiny again.
-Rinse well and pat dry.
I've tried a couple of different brands of baking soda and have found that Arm and Hammer is the very best. It cut my polishing time down in half and worked twice as well as the President's Choice brand. :)
Note: use caution with pieces that incorporate dyed beads, beads covered in a coating or foil (I made this mistake with pink seed beads that had a fine coating), or pearls, which can be delicate. If you're the creator and have some spare beads of the type used in the jewelry, test the method on them alone before polishing the finished piece. If you've purchased the item and don't have spare beads, consider asking the seller about their polishing method if you're unsure.
Store the polished jewelry in a dark, airless place. I generally keep mine in a sealed plastic bag (with the air pressed out) in a tin container with the lid on, but I have found that some earrings I stored in a small plastic container with the lid on remained shiny for a very long time.
I wrote up care instructions cards in Print Shop with the second method, and I print them onto pre-perforated business card paper I buy at Staples. I include one in all of my Etsy packages. :)
Showing posts with label method. Show all posts
Showing posts with label method. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
The art of photography.
I've heard a lot of artists in the Etsy forums say that they love to design and create their pieces, and they adore their shops and really enjoy selling online, but they hate photographing their items. I completely agree. I've struggled a lot with my photography. I love creating jewelry, I'm always pondering new designs, pairing beads together in my mind and thinking up names for my future creations. I want all of my pieces to find loving homes, and I know as an online seller and shopper that good photographs are the most important tool when selling over the internet.
Online shopping has its advantages. You can do it in your own time, pop in and out between work or chores, view a wider selection of items than there tends to be in any one regular store, and easily compare similar pieces. But the biggest drawback is that you can't pick up, turn over and feel the object. It can be hard to get a sense of size, true colour, or quality. This is where photos become crucial.
Unfortunately, most people who spend their time sewing, potting, sculpting, painting, making jewelry, etc, aren't spending their time learning to become world class photographers, and we can have a very hard time creating photos that are as incredible as our handcrafted items.
As with all aspects of my business, I want my photographs to be the very best they can be. I want them to have the "lust factor," as my mother calls it. That almost indescribable quality that compels you to click on an item photo no matter what it's a photo of.
The first thing I tried was a homemade light box. I found a tutorial online that described how to cut the top and sides from a cardboard box, cover the spaces with thin paper and aim lights into the box to illuminate the object. Those photos came out quite dim and a bit grainy looking, like so:
I quickly realized that though some people seem to have success with it, this method wasn't working for me. It was suggested to me that one of my items might photograph better on a dark background, so I laid out black paper on the cold stove top, turned on the hood range light, set the camera to flash and gave it a try. It seemed to be an improvement, so I spend a lot of time trying to perfect the technique, using PhotoShop to lighten the pictures where necessary. This is what that looked like:
Even though this seemed to be an improvement on the light box, the photos had an almost surreal quality to them. The black background was a bit stark and didn't help to give any depth or proportion to the items. I had about 30 items in my shop at that time, all photographed this way. They certainly didn't inspire "lust" in me, so how could they do so to my larger audience?
It was at this point that I started to understand why there is such a wide spread opinion that indirect nature light is the best method for photographing one's products. I decided that it was time to give the method a try. After experimenting with several backgrounds, including white and coloured paper, my sister, Natashia, tried an item on a weathered wooden bench that our aunt had given us as a housewarming present. The pale gray wood provided an interesting visual and some perspective to the pieces. Combined with the indirect natural light (the bench is in the shade of the garage) it created photographs that make it look like you can reach out and pick up the items.
Very pleased with this presentation, I set about rephotographing my entire shop. It took a few weeks, but I finally got all of my items changed over and was able to add more (I'm up to 79). I did need something a bit different for the first photograph of my earrings, and that was quickly remedied with a small house plant that I take outside with me.
I love the way that the natural backgrounds in natural light convey such a friendly, summery feel to my whole shop. And they do the most justice to the jewelry that I work so hard on. Now I just have to worry about what I'll do come winter..... ;)
Online shopping has its advantages. You can do it in your own time, pop in and out between work or chores, view a wider selection of items than there tends to be in any one regular store, and easily compare similar pieces. But the biggest drawback is that you can't pick up, turn over and feel the object. It can be hard to get a sense of size, true colour, or quality. This is where photos become crucial.
Unfortunately, most people who spend their time sewing, potting, sculpting, painting, making jewelry, etc, aren't spending their time learning to become world class photographers, and we can have a very hard time creating photos that are as incredible as our handcrafted items.
As with all aspects of my business, I want my photographs to be the very best they can be. I want them to have the "lust factor," as my mother calls it. That almost indescribable quality that compels you to click on an item photo no matter what it's a photo of.
The first thing I tried was a homemade light box. I found a tutorial online that described how to cut the top and sides from a cardboard box, cover the spaces with thin paper and aim lights into the box to illuminate the object. Those photos came out quite dim and a bit grainy looking, like so:
I quickly realized that though some people seem to have success with it, this method wasn't working for me. It was suggested to me that one of my items might photograph better on a dark background, so I laid out black paper on the cold stove top, turned on the hood range light, set the camera to flash and gave it a try. It seemed to be an improvement, so I spend a lot of time trying to perfect the technique, using PhotoShop to lighten the pictures where necessary. This is what that looked like:
Even though this seemed to be an improvement on the light box, the photos had an almost surreal quality to them. The black background was a bit stark and didn't help to give any depth or proportion to the items. I had about 30 items in my shop at that time, all photographed this way. They certainly didn't inspire "lust" in me, so how could they do so to my larger audience?
It was at this point that I started to understand why there is such a wide spread opinion that indirect nature light is the best method for photographing one's products. I decided that it was time to give the method a try. After experimenting with several backgrounds, including white and coloured paper, my sister, Natashia, tried an item on a weathered wooden bench that our aunt had given us as a housewarming present. The pale gray wood provided an interesting visual and some perspective to the pieces. Combined with the indirect natural light (the bench is in the shade of the garage) it created photographs that make it look like you can reach out and pick up the items.
Very pleased with this presentation, I set about rephotographing my entire shop. It took a few weeks, but I finally got all of my items changed over and was able to add more (I'm up to 79). I did need something a bit different for the first photograph of my earrings, and that was quickly remedied with a small house plant that I take outside with me.
I love the way that the natural backgrounds in natural light convey such a friendly, summery feel to my whole shop. And they do the most justice to the jewelry that I work so hard on. Now I just have to worry about what I'll do come winter..... ;)
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