A Handmade's Tale

This is a fabulous YouTube video, A Handmade's Tale, all about Etsy! It's worth 4 minutes of your time to watch and I'm blown away by how young the founder of Etsy looks. I loooove Etsy.

When I was a kid, I was always the only young person I knew who crocheted or who wore homemade clothing, made by my mom. Preppie kids at school made fun of my homemade clothes, but I thought it was very cool that she could make me exactly what I wanted, especially during the 60's when she made me "Rudi Gernrich" and Maryanne Faithful dresses, and big wide, flower printed bellbottoms like Cher wore. I sewed my own Barbie clothes (I still have them!) and I kept at it, making many handmade things during the crafting heyday of the 70's. In the late 90's I got into soapmaking and I'm still at it.

I'm so glad that there is a current movement among younger people to revive home crafts. Despite our technological advances, there is something still very satisfying about making beautiful, functional things. It gives people so much pleasure to make things for themselves and the people they love with their own two hands.

When I was in graduate school, I had a summer research assistantship doing library searches for a sociology professor. I had to find and copy articles about "the electric cottage," for his research on how cottage industries had grown due to home computers. At the time, I thought it was just plain weird, that this professor thought that eventually millions of people could work right from their homes, for themselves or for big companies, because they were connected with computers. I am now living proof of his hypothesis, 25 years later.