I’ve been spending a lot of time sewing, knitting and generally being a crafty little Christmas Elf the past few weeks. Part of my motivation is selfish: I love spending time self-indulgently sewing, knitting and crafting. Doing these things to make gifts allows me to guiltlessly justify the time spent crafting instead of washing the dishes, doing the laundry or washing the floors. But part of my motivation is also an unwillingness to drop huge amounts of money at big-box stores on products that my friends and family may or may not actually like or use. Joining the flood of consumers who will stampede each other to grab up earth-killing plastic crap is both un-enjoyable and expensive, financially and environmentally. So I stay at home, make a nice cup of tea and do something I love for the people I love. It’s a no-brainer, really.

It turns out that lots of other people are doing this these days, and it’s turning into something of a revolution that is beginning to be noticed by people at the New York Times. Both the act of handcrafting and buying handcrafted products are being hailed as the new socially and environmentally conscious choice to make. It’s getting easier for handcrafters to sell their wares with websites such as Etsy and Ebay providing premade online stores and shopping cart software, taking the technical difficulty out of setting up online selling and providing sellers with a growing market of people who are looking to buy handmade goods. Many people would rather buy from an individual than a faceless corporation because of the one-to-one connection, knowing that their money is supporting that individual doing something they love instead of paying sweatshop labourers a pittance and some fatcat CEO a fortune.
I would love to see more people supporting handcrafts by creating crafty stuff themselves or purchasing locally made crafts. If we all made more of our own stuff, maybe we wouldn’t need Wal Mart anymore. Imagine that!

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