In the colors of autumn leaves…

The story of this shawl takes me back to November, when I was making a birthday gift for my sister. I didn`t have any plan of blogging this, but when I was crocheting there, I suddenly found myself thinking of photographing handmade items, making photos of work in progress and posting them on social media. I found myself looking at the situation I was in – sitting on the floor, a mess around me, an ugly green crochet hook in my hands. At that moment I understood how we produce nice photos of ourselves working, photos that to some extent reflect the reality, but we`ve made the reality a bit nicer to make it more attractive.

Now you wonder what do I mean by all this?

Well, look at the photo on the left. It`s made with my phone (the only thing I removed from the floor, just to take the photo). This is how it actually looked like, when I was working there. An empty cup of coffee, yarn labels on the floor, printed pattern, an ugly green crochet hook etc. That`s the real life!

But if I wanted to make a post on Instagram, then I´d do something like you see on the photo on the right. It`s much nicer, don`t you think?! The colorful shawl looks prettier on the white background. Also I brought out my beautiful scissors (although I prefer to use the comfortable ones) and lovely golden crochet hook (although it`s in the wrong size). Also a full cup of coffee looks much better, isn`t it!

But how did I do this? It`s easy, watch:

That`s how you do the social media magic! You make your life look fancier and yourself looking more confident in what you do. It`s clever and sad at the same time.

But why did I even take the time to talk about it? Well, I´ve seen a lot of photos of that type on my favourite social media channel, the Instagram (you can find me there too!). They`re like a cliche, always look stunning and eye-catching, but also artificial and unrealistic. They always make me wonder who`s he real person behind all this and is his / her life really the way it`s pictured…?

Anyway, the shawl turned out really nice. Many thanks to Two of Wands for the lovely pattern I enjoyed working with! I was happy and so was my sister :)