Tag Archives: creativity

Turn Your Love Of Crafts Into A Full Blown Business

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Turn Your Love Of Crafts Into A Full Blown Business

Do you love trying your luck with some at home DIY? Perhaps you love sinking your teeth into a craft project and not stopping until you have a finished result that is both stunning and a major conversation starter. If that’s the case, it might be worth considering whether you can turn your love for crafts like sewing, knitting, or woodwork into a full blown career. If you love it that much, it’s never a bad idea to explore the possibility of basing your life and your earnings around it. Let’s explore how to get started with this idea:

Getting Set Up:

If you’re completing woodwork, at the very least, you’ll need a tuner and a few saws. You might also need a work table and, if you are operating in a small space, a piece of equipment to keep the air clean. Safety might also be a concern for this one, so make sure that you have goggles because if a wooden splinter gets in your eye… you’re going to cry. For some crafts, the set up is a tad simpler. If you are sewing clothing, for example, you just need something like an embroidery machine. You can get an affordable embroidery machine for your business on the market at a price that you should easily be able to fit into your budget. Once you have this, you can get started producing gorgeous products.

It is worth pointing out that at this stage, you should not be focused on making money. Instead, you should put all of your time and effort into producing items that are of high quality and will interest a few buyers. But quality should always be your top priority.

How To Sell:

Once you have a few products ready to sell, you should think about the source that you’re going to use to sell them. The easiest option here would be to set up a website. That way, you will be able to sell all of the products you want without any trouble at all. If you don’t want to invest a lot of money into this idea just yet, it’s worth just starting with a free blog using a basic template. As your business grows, you’re going to need to be a little more clever with marketing. But for the first few weeks, you’ll probably only be selling to family, friends, and acquaintances anyways.

Finding The Right Price:

When you start your business, it doesn’t matter what price you sell your products at. You don’t even have to make a profit, because it’s all about finding your footing on the market and gaining the interest from target customers. But eventually, you will need to focus on making money, and to do that you need to have the right price to make a profit. You will need to take into account production costs, the price of materials that you use, and deliveries. When all of this is taken into account, you might find you need to sell your items at a tad more than you expected.

If you use these steps, you will find yourself with the starting blocks to turn a passion for crafts into a money making career. Good luck, you beautiful, crafty genius!

Featured Image By: Pexels

How Randomness Can Add Creativity To Your Photography

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In many ways, the high technology of the modern world spoils us, especially when it comes to photography. Thanks to computers and Photoshop, there is more scope than ever before to be creative and to be expressive in photos. There are all sorts of techniques that can be used and many of them can help to make your work look more artistic and creative. Here are some fun camera hacks to help you add randomness and creativity to your work:

Move The Camera: Most professional photography courses emphasize the importance of keeping the camera as still as possible. The reason for this is to preserve things like lines and sharp edges and to prevent the photo from looking blurred. But sometimes you actually want to blur to convey a sense of motion to the image you’re snapping.

There are several popular ways of using the motion of the camera to take a better shot. “Panning”, for example, is a technique used most frequently in sports when following a target, like a horse, from one side of the field of view to the other. Another technique is “rotation” where the camera takes a photograph mid-whirls. Finally, there is camera throwing, where you literally throw the camera to take the shot. (With this one, you might want to prepare an area where the camera can land softly!).

As you can see, moving the camera can provide countless effects in itself. However, if you are shooting objects that are really moving, you might need more specialized equipment. For example, a car race would be shot best with a Line Scan Camera because of its high speed processing.

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The camera was not thrown for this picture!

Creative Focusing: You don’t need a full-blown DSLR to play around with focus. Some of the best bridge cameras in 2017 also come with options that allow users to focus either slightly in front or slightly behind the subject. The purpose of doing this is usually to pick out some other element of the photograph to focus on, leaving the rest of the image blurred. With the right foreground and background colors, this sort of technique can create intrigue and mystery.

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I’m intrigued 😉

Zoom & Shoot: Another way to use your camera is to zoom in while you shoot. This has the effect of making the outer edge of the image blurred while keeping the subject in the center in focus. Zooming while shooting makes it appear as if the whole image is sort of popping out at you. It’s also possible to combine zoom with a slow sync flash, which can produce some pretty spectacular results.

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Flickr Image

Shoot From Below: Top professional photographers have been using low-angle shots for decades to evoke a sense of scale. It turns out that the technique is extremely useful. Even regular sized objects take on whole new personalities when shot from below. What’s more, shooting from below is interesting for viewers. In our daily lives, we rarely see things from a mouse-eye view, and so when we do, it’s engaging if nothing else.

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Holy moly!

Use Over Exposure: Another thing photography school warns about is overexposing your shots. But doing it in the right setting, especially when an image contains dazzling colors, can be really effective. If you bump up the exposure setting on your camera, sometimes you can generate beautiful effects with foreground objects contrasting nicely with the burnt out background of the scene.

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Pretty!

Whether your passion lies in front of or behind the camera, learning the proper techniques can only benefit you in your line of work!

Lil Red’s Psychic Experience

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Lil Red’s Psychic Experience

Whatsup everyone and happy Thursday! So a very interesting occurrence happened today that was just too wild not to write about. I went to visit my dear friend, Neva, at her nursing home and while we were hanging out I had a run in with a psychic. Allow me to explain.

^^^ This bands name is Psychic Friend so including their music seemed appropriate!

So yes, Neva and I were hanging out and one of the residents approached us. His name was Doug and after Neva introduced us he asked what I do. I told him that I was in school and that I was really into writing. Without skipping a beat, Doug immediately said “you’re a blogger”. Taken aback I replied with, “How did you know that?!” He then began to tell me that he was a psychic medium and told me that he sees great success for my blog in the future. After telling me of the success that lifewithlilred has in store for me he regarded my clothing because as usual I was dressed pretty formally for an every day occasion. Doug told me that he could see me walking around on Fifth Avenue in a pair of expensive knee high boots and then told me that I was definitely a writer in my past life.

While Doug and I were having this talk, Neva was growing impatient and wanted to go back to her room. So we headed back to headquarters after I hugged my new friend goodbye. After a lovely visit with Neva and her friends I said my farewells and got back into the Little Red Love Machine to go home. As I was driving for the next five or so minutes all I could do was think about Doug and everything that he said to me. It truly made my day so I just had to turn around and thank him – I honestly wouldn’t have been able to forgive myself if I didn’t. So I turned my whip around and went back into the direction of the nursing home and reentered the building in search of my friend.

Once I found Doug’s room, I knocked on the door and told him that I didn’t want to leave without saying goodbye and thanking him one more time. Once again, he told me that I had good things in store for me and that he could sense my talent and energy from across the room. He told me that I was a 19th century European writer in my past life and then began to tell me what my past self was life. Doug told me that I could gamble with the best of them and out-smoke and out-roll a cigar better than any man. He compared me to Emily Bronte countless times and said that my creativity is something that should never be contained. The entire time I was thinking about just how wild and cool the whole situation was. I don’t know if Doug got the idea of me being a European from the purse I was carrying that dons the British flag on it but hey, I’ll take it. I also found it intriguing that he mentioned gambling, considering I’ve had a few recent trips to the casino. The cigar smoking part was also very fascinating to me because I smoke cigarettes now. Weird!

Doug and I talked for another fifteen minutes or so before we parted ways. He told me that he was leaving the nursing home tomorrow when I said that I would stop in and see him next time I visited Neva, so I was SO glad that I turned around and saw him again. My gut feeling to turn my car around and talk to him was spot on and I’m beyond thankful that I got to spend some time with Doug. Psychic or not, he made me feel genuinely good about myself and I felt obligated to return and express my gratitude to him. I can only hope that our visit with each other made his day just as much as it made mine!

So there you have it, my psychic experience for the day! Has anyone ever had a psychic reading before? How accurate was it? I wanna hear from all of you, so leave me a comment and let’s chat! Much love. -Sarah