My granddaughter put me on Etsy. I sold one potholder in March.
I don't know that I'm doing any of this right, so I'll just tell it plain.
My granddaughter set me up a shop back in the fall. Said folks would buy my work online. So I put up four pieces, took the pictures on my kitchen table with a dish towel behind them for a background, and then I sat there and waited like a hen on a nest.
March I sold one potholder. Five dollars.
But here's the thing that's got me thinking. The quilts I post on here, the big ones, the ones I spent a year on? People look but they don't buy, and I understand it, you don't buy a quilt off a phone from a stranger in Alabama. What sold was the little thing. Something small enough to hold in your hand and cheap enough not to think too hard about.
Then last month a lady in Seattle bought a quilt. Said she saw it on here and went and found the shop herself. I never once mentioned the shop on my page. Not one time.
So I don't know what to make of that. I put the sign out front and nobody came in. I hung the quilt on the line and somebody knocked on the door. Maybe that's just how it works and nobody told me. Or maybe I'm still fooling with it wrong.
I'm 63 years old and I've been sewing since I was seven. I know cloth. I do not know this. 🙂
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Five dollars for a potholder, and a year on the quilts nobody buys off a phone. The potholder is the only sensible purchase in the shop, and that is not a comment on your work. It is a comment on photographs.
I say this as someone who paints plants and has photographed far too many of them badly. A quilt and a potholder are the same problem in different sizes: the picture has to show the thing. A dish towel background flattens the stitching, hides the hand, and makes eighteen months of work look like a catalogue image. What a buyer is actually responding to is evidence that a person made it, and that evidence lives in the seam lines and the light falling across the fabric, not in the object's footprint.
If the granddaughter is still willing, the most useful thing she could do is not promote you. It is to take the quilts outside on a grey day and photograph the corners. Close, no flash, plain wall behind, and a photograph of the back as well, because the back is where the truth of a quilt is. Then price the things and say so out loud. People do not avoid quilts because they are expensive. They avoid them because they cannot tell whether the person who made it knows what they are doing.
You know. That part hasn't come across yet.
I paint, and I photograph my own canvases, badly, for years now. So I half agree.
Where I'd push back: the dish towel isn't the real problem, the light is. A quilt photographed in flat kitchen light is a document of a quilt. Raking light across the surface, close enough that one bad stitch or one raised ridge catches it, and suddenly there is a hand in the picture. I have spent whole afternoons chasing that and mostly not getting it.
But I'm not sure photographs are the whole of it either. Nobody buys the big one off a phone from a stranger, you said that yourself. The potholder sells because five dollars is a decision you can make in four seconds and be wrong about without regret. A year of someone's life is not that kind of decision, no matter how good the picture is. I don't think you fix that with a camera, only with time and people who already trust you a little.
Which is the part that nobody tells you when they set the shop up for you.
Now see, "raking light" is a phrase I never had for it, but I know the thing you mean. My grandmother's quilts, if you catch them from the side by a window, those little puckers and ridges stand right up, and you can see where her hands pulled the thread. That's the part I love most, and I've been photographing mine flat as a pancake with a dish towel behind them. So I hear you.
You're right that a potholder is a sensible purchase. Five dollars and it can't disappoint you. I've just been slow to see that maybe the small pieces are the introduction, not the consolation prize.
I'm gonna try the light off the side this week. I'll report back if it works or if I just make myself cross-eyed.
Mm, honey, you're not wrong and it stings a little, so that's how I know it's true. That dish towel was me trying to make the table look nice, not me trying to show the quilt. Two different things.
Here's my trouble with it. The stitching is the whole point. My grandmother's stitches go one way and mine go another, and you can see where I changed my mind about a color, and none of that lives in a picture taken under a kitchen bulb at eight at night with the flash on. A flat even light makes a quilt look like fabric. It should look like somebody's hands got tired.
My granddaughter keeps telling me to take them outside in the morning. I keep not doing it. Maybe that's the five dollars talking.