Before and After

Happy Monday! It’s a beautiful day in Alabama ~ sunny and 66 ~ and the kids are out of school and are outside playing. Perfect day to be inside sewing and doing a blog post, huh? This weekend Jeff took Sissy to a Father Daughter Dance. This is one of 100,000,000 reasons I thank God for giving us a little girl. Such a fun night and I think I had more fun shopping for this dance than anything. You won’t find much fancy and shiny in Mallory’s closet, but on this night I had to find the perfect dress. After searching high and low for a dress with a decent price tag that she would probably only wear once, I found this one at Belk. Can’t beat the sale dress with an add’l 40% off. Believe me, there are some tacky dresses out there. It’s hard to find decent, cute girl clothes once you bypass the toddler sizes. Anyway, they had a ball and here are a couple of pics!

My two girls!! Love love love them!!

Now on to what I have really been up to lately. We have roughly 750 designs on our website. For the past several months, I have been going through some of the old designs and either editing the web photos to remove the background, or re-sewing the design altogether. It’s amazing what fresh fabrics will do! I use Photoshop Elements to remove the background of my photos. I test stitch all of our samples usually on a double layer of medium cutaway stabilizer (5×7, PES designs). Sometimes if I have a shirt then I sew it on a shirt. I try to take my web photos outside in good sunlight (I have a Canon Rebel xsi), then I crop & edit them in a program called Photoscape, which is free. I then use Photoshop Elements to remove the background from the image. This is tedious work and the whole web photo process is why it sometimes takes us 3 days to get a new design listed.  I use both programs because I am not savvy enough to just use PE. I also use Photoscape to add the watermark (www.appliquecafe.com) to my photos. All you do is add text!

Here are a few examples of some BEFORE & AFTER shots of some of our older designs. This is our Bird on Vine design which has been around for a long long time. I re-sewed it on a Sassy Kid Blanks Candy Pink A-Line dress and it looks soooooo much better! If you missed it, see my RECENT POST about Sassy Kid Blanks and all they have to offer. There’s nothing really wrong with the old picture and this has been a popular design, but the background is a little dark and as you can see below, the design looks great on the pink dress.

Love love love this design on this dress! This is the 5×7 design on a size 6 dress.

This is our Birthday Cake design before & after. The background on the left is super dark, and it just needed a makeover. Again, this is an older design (#109 out of like 750). Doesn’t the new web photo look SOOO much better? When I say “remove the background”, I mean I remove the stabilizer or shirt or whatever the design is stitched on. It really makes the design itself stick out.

Here is our Birthday Hat (girl) design and this was one of the very first designs we did (#4). My old web photo (left) was way too dark. I probably took it inside and it definitely looks better with some new fabric and a better, brighter photo.

I think this is one of my favorites. This is our Mittens design. The left photo is dark and the fabrics are kind of blahhhh. It looks 200X better with brighter fabrics and an edited photo.

I’m slowly getting all of the designs edited with no backgrounds and a few more re-sewn that need makeovers. I hope it makes a difference! I’m stitching our Lion design now, and our Rudolph is next even though Christmas is a long way away.

Photos make all the difference in selling your product! Try to get outside on a sunny day and take your photos. Props are good too if you are selling a dress or a shirt (like my dress form above). Hang your shirt from a tree, or the vinyl photo backdrops are popular now too. Search for them on Etsy.com!

Check out ALL DESIGNS on our website to see how our photos look! Have a great week!