Brian, I just took a look at the pics of the Texas Toothpicks in question. I can offer a little more advice for your consideration in the spirit of helping.
The busy background isn't helping you here as well as the fact that there's a lot more background in the shot than knife. If you have any sort of photo or graphics software you can crop out all of the excess background around the knives. The photo is also a little dark overall.
Also the way you have the knives standing on their spines causes the background fabric to reflect in the blades of the knives which "muddies" them up a little.
In the future you might try a plain, light colored background and daylight/windowlight just to keep things simple. If you have a half decent camera you should be fine. Two things you want to read about in the camera manual are macro mode and white balance settings. These are two things that can greatly improve your photos.
I make my living as a professional photographer so I would never dispute the fact that a DSLR will give you the ultimate image quality but the learning curve can be steep and the expense great. If you're only posting images in the for sale forum it's overkill.
I hope this helps some,
Michael
