The Truth Behind the Photo: Craft Disasters and the Selfie Stick

We’re back for another installment of one of our favorite features: the truth behind the photo. The thing about blogs is that you experience other peoples’ homes and projects entirely through photos, and it’s easy to forget that not everything is as it appears. We’re not talking photoshop or deliberately misleading photos — but angles, lighting, and cropping can make a big difference in transforming an image and even make the difference between a project that looks like success on film but was a disaster in real life.

We love sharing these truths because some of the things that go on behind the camera are pretty ridiculous — and if we didn’t tell you about absurd things like the time Sage climbed up a ladder outside her house to photograph Sam’s study, then we’d have to confront some scary questions about the way we choose to spend our time. Instead, we just get to write it off as blog content.

So today we’re sharing the truth behind some recent projects: our “bloggeriest crafts of early 2016,” aka the raccoon oven-baked clay trinket dishes and Pantone color-dipped cork chandelier. You might have thought these projects were ridiculous enough on their own, but the behind-the-scenes had us laughing even harder than the final results.

First up, the trinket dishes with the adorable raccoon face/butt combo:

These were total spoofs (raccoons eat trash and carry rabies, people), but the final photos had even the two of us thinking maybe we were onto something. I mean seriously, that is a well-styled shot. But now we have to let you in an a sad little secret:

Okay so we want to be totally clear: normally we don’t tell you that a project worked when it didn’t, because that would be outright lying. But these were joke projects that were never intended to be replicated. So we omitted a crucial little detail, which is that after we’d shaped our dishes and were ready to bake them we noticed this on the packaging:

In case you’re having trouble reading this, it says: “Do not bake or fire.” And, “Never hardens.” Um, say what now? Somehow we managed to grab the exact wrong clay while running around Michaels. Obviously we were left with no choice but to forge ahead and deceive you all via photographic trickery.

Our first challenge was that we want to add little legs to the dishes, but we thought they’d be so soft they’d sag. So we did what any normal person would do, and used the lids of mason jars to reinforce the bottom of the dishes. We were already in deep at this point, there was no turning back.

We were also worried we’d have trouble painting on the soft clay, but it worked just fine. And they turned out to be so adorable that we were glad they were actually totally unusable or else we probably both would have ended up with ironic raccoon trinket dishes on our bedside tables, thus becoming the punchline of our own joke. There’s really nothing worse than that.

We also had a little too much behind-the-scenes fun with our amaaaaaazing color-dipped shabby chic cork chandelier.

First off, question: what’s more ridiculous than this craft project? Answer: the amount of work that we put into getting perfectly-styled photos for this craft project.

We also realized partway through the project that the cork strands make incredible necklaces, so we clearly had to pause for a brief fashion photo shoot (no doubt we are the most stylish people you know).

Of course we have to get meta with this and show you the truth behind the photo of the truth behind the photo, which is us using a selfie stick (for the very first time…Sage won it at an office holiday party Yankee Swap) to snap this picture.

And of course here’s a photo of Brad taking a photo of us taking a photo of ourselves with the selfie stick:

And then a photo of us looking at the photo Brad took of us using the selfie stick:

So in summary, we took a break from making a ridiculous satirical craft in order to festoon ourselves with cork necklaces and then take a photo of ourselves with a selfie stick while Brad took a photo of us taking a photo of ourselves and then we took a photo of Brad doing that and then we looked at the photo and took a photo of that too. Absurd? Undoubtedly. But we seriously suspect that this is the sort of thing that’s going on behind the camera a lot of the time when people share “candid” photos of themselves online.

We hope this gave you a little taste of what it’s like to be behind the camera with us without actually having to spend an entire day of your life making joke crafts. Next week we have a little more disaster for you (as usual), plus Sage is starting to tear her kitchen apart for the Great Kitchen Renovation of 2016 and Naomi will be sharing progress on her bedroom makeover — stay tuned!

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