The Times 'Credit Crunch Chic' excerpt

The Times recently published an article by India Knight, entitled 'Credit Crunch Chic' which covered all manner of ways to save money in the home, via home cooking, beauty on a budget, clothing, shopping and more.
Among the very valid pointers was a couple of paragraphs on the virtue of craft work (see below). It illustrates the current trend for all things hand-made and might be an inspiration to those of you selling your handmade items online...
For the full article, please click here.


"CRAFT WORKS"

"If you’re under 30 and fairly with it, you’ll understand what I’m talking about when I say the craft movement is huge and super-cool.

I could write an entire book about all of this, and about what it means for so many young women to be redefining domesticity in such empowering, self-sufficient ways. For our current purposes, though, all you need to know is that there’s never been a better time to get into crafting. Make craftster.org your first port of call. The site contains everything about everything to do with crafts, as well as being a giant online community.

Then move on to etsy.com. It’s like a huge crafts mall, containing tens of thousands of individual stalls run by people selling the stuff they make. It sells absolutely everything you could possibly imagine: handmade clothes, accessories, jewellery, bath goods, wedding- cake figurines, frames, ceramics, knitted stuff, art (some of it fantastic), toys — and that is the merest tip of the world’s biggest iceberg. It’s marvellous and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Etsy is the first site I visit if I want to buy someone an original (as in, often, literally one of a kind), lovely, bargainous present. Plus, obviously, you’re not lining the pockets of some giant greedy-guts corporation; you’re (gently) lining the pockets of a fashion student in Brooklyn, or a mother of four from Dorset who crafts in her spare time. Every item you buy from such a person strikes a blow against mass production. Everything about Etsy rocks.

If you are any good at making anything at all, I strongly urge you to set yourself up with an Etsy boutique; as some of the craft bloggers who have Etsy shops will tell you, you can start earning serious pocket money — after which, of course, the sky’s the limit."