I may not be the best seamstress in the world... but I also don't have to make garments for 12 hours a day just to make slave wages.  When you buy handmade, you give your hard-earned money directly to someone who made what you buy, not to a corporation which takes most of your money and gives it to CEOs and stockholders.  When you buy handmade, you do not support sweatshops in third world countries, you do not support long hours for little pay and unsafe working conditions.

When you buy a $40 dollar pair of jeans from a chain store, you pay the owners of the company, the CEOs and stockholders, you pay for shipping of the item, merchandising in the store, the employees who work at the store to sell you the pair of jeans... and a little to the person who made them.  When you buy handmade, you pay the person who dreamed up your item, the person who made it.

Usually, when you buy handmade, you buy from a person in your own country, a person who maybe even lives in your own state, your own town... Maybe it's even someone you know.  Your hard-earned money stays in your economy, to circulate amongst your own countrymen... it stays in your life, if not in your wallet.

One of the reasons we in the United States are experiencing this 'recession' is that for so long, the value of our economy has essentially been determined by the perceived value of our economy.  Not only is that circular logic, but it means that value has not been placed on what we produce, but our image.  Obviously, we cannot do many things at home or as small business.  We shouldn't handcraft steel beams, or have every construction worker do his or her own interpretation of a house or road.  But if we valued again honest work, done by our neighbors, our friends, people who seem real to us, our money would stay here.  We just might not have any financial collapses for a while.

And corporations would stop shipping jobs overseas so that they could pay next to nothing for work in a dirty and dangerous factory.  Maybe the people in those sweatshops would be able to work for their own nations, instead of having to work to sate our appetites for cheap goods.

I know I'm not going to start a cultural revolution here, and I kmnow that most of us think we can't afford to make that shift, but if I can make even one person to decide to buy one quality handmade product instead of two pieces of Chinese junk, then I'll be happy.

Pass on freely.

Why did I seemingly suddenly decide to start sewing like mad and open an online shop to sell my wares?

Well, it wasn't so sudden, really.  I'd been thinking for a few years about making cloaks and other medieval garb type things and selling them at SCA events... I just didn't know how to start.  And all that travelling costs money, and it's hard to work a regular job and do that, so... it just never happened.  Then recently, I discovered websites that helped people sell wares they made at home, and I started to get a little more serious about the idea.

Those of you who know me probably know that my job has been lawn and garden maintenance for the past year and a half or so.  If you are familiar at all with Washington state lately, you know that we didn't get a very long spring, have had a serious lack of rain, and that lawns started turning brown and dead in June.  In fact, the grass has just started to green up again in the past two weeks.  Now that it's October, and the growing season nearly done.  This has just been a terrible year for my kind of work, and in fact, has been even worse where I live than the surrounding areas.  Many days we essentially prayed for rain, only to watch the rain clouds go around us and bless other areas of the state.  

Anyway, there's not a lot of work.  It will pick up a little, now that it's finally started raining, but what work we get will be short lived, as we stumble into winter soon, and since there was no good season to get me through the bad season... Well, let's just say that I could be happier with my financial situation.

Not that it's all bad, though.  What I do have is lots of time and a closet full of old hoarded fabric, buckets of ideas and a venue to help me sell things.  Time to follow a dream, you might say.

I don't want anyone to think that I'm just doing this in hopes of making money temporarily, though.  This is something I hope to make a living of, eventually.  I know it won't happen right away, I know it will be hard work, I know there will be bad times, even if I do succeed.  Even so, this is what I want.  

And I hope that others will want to own the things I want to make :)