Early Morning on Market Day in Diss

This morning was beautiful, with mists and sun so I went out early with the camera for some of those shots. But not early enough; within 10 minutes the sun had burnt off all that mist. So instead I'll take you round parts of my local market town of Diss: 

Not a soul to be seen around the Mere apart from a couple of hopeful fishermen

It's market day on a Friday - these flowers looked so fresh this early

And I witnessed a spot of crafty shop lifting too...

So many places were open already, all before 8 in the morning, with a relaxed chatty buzz around the town

Mouth-watering delights can be found at Frederick's Fine Foods - these baskets outside look glorious

Rooms with a View has to one of the loveliest shops in town, and not just because they sell our handmade greeting cards. They support all sorts of British artisan makers, and are super fantastic with interior design advice.

The Jewellery Workshop is another gem of a shop

I like all the angles on this fire escape and the buildings

A pleasant half hour spent in a small Norfolk market town.

A Day Off, and out to Sandringham Flower Show

We made the most of yesterday's summer day, gave ourselves an afternoon off and went off to the Sandringham Flower Show. Here's some of what we enjoyed:

 

We bought some fabulous handmade soaps from the very talented and professional Royston and Hayes

 We enjoyed some Posh Pop from the lovely Breckland Orchard and a couple of Norfolk pork pies from Bray's Cottage - yummy lunch that was!

 We went a little off piste and wandered around the grounds of Sandringham house

 These are the remembrance plaques for some of their Sandringham Estate dogs

 

 Part of the church with its carrstone construction

 And then to look at the whitest and straightest leeks I've ever seen. I can't imagine they'd have much taste.

 This was one of the show gardens - quite pretty we thought.

And finally, armed with a coffee, we watched these beautiful Suffolk punches walking around the ring.

Very pleasant lazy day - must do similar more often!

Our trip to the Royal Highland Show

This year was our first time at the Royal Highland Show, just outside Edinburgh and although it was quite a long drive and we faced challenging weather, it proved to be a very enjoyable show. We always love going to the agricultural shows – must be something to do with all the animals! Rather fittingly, we took lots of photos of highland cows this year

and witnessed the unusual sight of a rather large cow at the “beauty salon” - hair being brushed and blow dryed!

One of our Highland Cow designs

There were also lots of sheep at the show, but the most interesting could be found in the Campaign for Wool tent. The Campaign for Wool is focused on the many benefits that can be gained from using wool including its durability and the fact that it is a natural and renewable source of fibre. The campaign also highlights the variety of different industries that use wool; fashion, carpets and rugs, and the building trade. 

While in the tent, we saw the winners of the “fleece competition” – a competition that was previously unknown to me (but obviously not to Penny who sometimes seems to be weirdly fascinated by dirty fleeces!), but interesting none the less. The soundtrack for the tent was a variety of different “baas” coming from some lovely Blue Faced Leicesters, Shetlands, and our favourite a Scottish Blackface ram. While the ram was very handsome, he was somewhat reluctant when it came to photos! However, we persisted and came away with this: (Gives me a headache just thinking of carrying that around all the time)

The Highland Show is more commercially biased, it seemed to me, than other agricultural shows that we’ve been to. The farm animals were mostly the commercial breeds, and no pigs, or goats. The Royal Norfolk Show, which piggy backed onto the Highland show, has a much wider variety of breeds with some lovely rare and minority breeds. I couldn't resist this endearing face, belonging to a coloured Ryeland:

Also, with the dog show running alongside, there’s more opportunity to see lots of dog breeds – I now hanker after a husky, a collie and a long haired red dachshund....!

Next up for us is the Great Yorkshire Show, I wonder what we’ll see there!

Emma

White Backgrounds for Professional Looking Product Photographs

I'm no expert, but then lots of us aren't so I thought I'd show you what I'm doing to produce the white backgrounds that we need for our product photographs. It's not perfect, so do please add your comments so that we can all improve.

I use Photoshop, so that might be the first stumbling block for some. I’m not an expert with Photoshop; it’s just that that’s what I’ve got!

This is all I do:

Open the file.

From the toolbar on the left, select the polygonal lasso tool. You need to go round the product using this tool – click on one point and then carefully go around the product, clicking wherever you need to change angle or direction. This anchors your line as you go round the object. I'm lucky with cards and pictures as there are lots of straight lines, but I don't envy jewellers or florists!

When you get back to where you started, your cursor symbol will have a little circle which completes the circuit. Just click to close the circuit.

From the toolbar at the top, choose the Select menu and then inverse. (Or right click on the file and select inverse)

Select fill from the Edit menu

In the window that pops up, for Contents use White, Blending is normal and opacity is 100%. Click ok and there you have your white background.

Not ideal as it removes all the shadows.

I've also used Fofofuse which is great for keeping the shadows; however I found a few drawbacks:

·         we have an incredibly slow broadband speed (well, we are in darkest Norfolk!) so doing a lot of photos at once is a labour of love

·         I also found that the quality of the photo was sometimes reduced during the process

·         You need to take the photo of the product on a white or black background

·         If you've got experience of Fotofuse, please do share your tips and advice here.

So here is the same photo edited both ways:

The original photo, taken with a compact point and click camera

Edited with Photoshop as described here (done in haste for this blog post!)

Edited using Fotofuze

 

What software and techniques do you use? Please do share here - it'll help us all to get better photographs and make more sales!

Introducing new colours

A couple of weeks before the Country Living Magazine's Spring fair I was clearing out one of the sheds to find a box of frames that had got forgotten. The frames looked tired and dull, so a quick trip was made into our local and very lovely interiors shop (Rooms with a View, in Diss) to get some Farrow and Ball paints. We chose 4 colours for this year which we think look very good together, and set off our work beautifully (well, we think so!)

This is Charleston Grey - quite dark but really sets off some of the darker grey Shetland fleece that we use:

The lighter Lamproom grey also looks very good with some of the greys we use, as with these cats:

The slightly warmer Elephant's Breath frames these dogs, and sets them off a treat:

And our final choice is Oxford Stone (but we admit this is our least favourite of the 4!):

We're continuing with using Pigeon which we've been using for our clocks for quite a while - a very popular choice with many of our customers:

Which is your favourite? Or would you like something completely different? We'd love to hear your comments.

Country Living Magazine's Spring Fair

Day 1 -setting up, part 1 An early start to sort out the dogs before setting off from Norfolk for London. Mike helps with this show, by driving us into London. We had to make a slight detour (maps on the iPad came in handy!) to get to a warehouse to pick up some paper bags - oops, hadn't realised I'd run out. We always arrive at the Business Design Centre early so that we can drive straight in and get unloaded. I unload while Mike puts up the lights; coffee and sarnie and then off to book in at my hotel. Mike then returns to the peace and quiet of Norfolk and I go back to carry on setting up. A bit emotional this time, partly remembering my lovely Dad, whose funeral was last year during the show, and partly because a few pieces somehow got damaged in transit. But by 6.30 the bulk of the stand is done. Tomorrow I need to adjust the lights and sort out all the greeting cards. And I will be done by noon - I have a ticket for the David Hockney exhibition - I'm so excited!! Hmm - writing this on my iPad I can't see how to format the font etc - ah well. A couple of photos: oops, no, don't know how to upload those either on the iPad. There's so much to learn!

A Good Day Out

So, earlier in the month mum and I took a trip to the NEC for the huge international Spring Fair for the gift trade. We had to postpone the visit a day or two due to the unexpected snow!

We’ve been exhibiting at this trade show for quite a few years, so it was a bit of a change to not be working and having a look around instead and doing a bit of research for some new ideas. The show is the biggest that I’ve been to, and it’s always quite fun to look around the card hall, which is where we normally exhibit our handmade cards and art, but this year we got to have a good look around the gift and home halls as well.  It’s just incredible how many greeting card companies there are at the show – some fantastic cards, and some that aren’t to my taste. The layout of the halls had changed this year, so we found it a bit confusing, but found lots that we were looking for (and lots that we didn’t know we could look for!)

As we were walking around, mum kept spotting people that she knew from different shows, and I saw a few people that I knew too. This did slow up our progress, but it was good to catch up with so many other exhibitors. We caught up with Karen from Zoobookoo  who designs a range of educational toys and games, (I’ve still got my football cube book!) The two of them made a plans for their pizza meal while at the Country Living Magazine’s Spring Fair later this month – large pizza, salad and bottle of red, I think.

Some of my favourite cards from the show were from A Farmer’s Daughter  who designs simple but really enchanting cards with a countryside feel. I particularly liked the range that featured farm animals

 

We also saw a lovely range of cards that were made by women living in the Kibera slum in Nairobi, Kipepeo Designs. Through their work the women are able to support themselves and their families, and learn all sorts of new skills, and build good friendships. The cards start out as shredded paper from offices, and are hand finished with all sorts of things, like recycled tin cans, and then are signed by whoever has made it. It was the designs that drew us into their stand at the show, and then the whole story blew us away. Lovely. Shame I couldn’t have bought one at the show (that’s the downside of going to these trade shows – you can’t buy anything! Probably a good thing, since I’m on a student budget!) 

So after a day well spent looking around the show, we had a quick cup of tea and a brain storming session on our new ideas. Mum then ventured back out into the snow, and I headed off on the train back to uni to finish my dissertation.

Emma