Reply #24: Seriously, KoKo, they didn't take it away [View All]

[Tansy_Gold]

Even if a person -- male or female -- doesn't make things to sell, making those things has VALUE.

I used to make almost all my own clothes and my kids'. I still make a lot of mine. Last summer, for instance, i bought a bunch of sale fabric at Jo-Ann's and made myself eight shirts for less than $10. Those eight shirts would have cost at least $10 each in a store, even a Wal-Mart, so I contributed $70 in the value of my labor to the family budget. And I kept it out of the corporate bandits' pockets.

the big box retailers and the cheap imports have made a dent in the artisan economy, to be sure. But they haven't destroyed it.

Sometimes, we simply get too accustomed to all the "luxuries" and conveniences our incomes allow us. We don't want to give that up, and it's easier to say someone else took the opportunities away from us. My son always laughs because hubby and I have only one television and it's not a big screen one with all the bells and whistles. We don't have a second one in the bedroom, a portable in the kitchen, etc., etc. But truth is we hardly watch ANY tv, except on week-ends when it's too hot to do anything else. We've simply adjusted our lifestyle to do without constant tv.

Can people adjust their lifestyles to do without daily consumption of disposable diapers, microwave dinners, bottled water, paper plates, and the latest from Tommy Hilfiger? And if they did do without these things, in what ways would their lives be richer?

Arts & crafts are alive and well. I'd be willing to bet there's a major fair within 100 miles of your house this very week-end. I'd be willing to bet there's also a Michael's, a Jo-Ann's, a Hobby Lobby or other major crafts supply outlet within 100 miles of your house, too.

William Morris, proponent of Arts and Crafts and ardent Socialist, said, "To give people pleasure in the things they must perforce use, that is one great office of decoration; to give people pleasure in the things they must perforce make, that is the other use of it." Not all the Arts & Crafts followers were financially successful -- the story of William and Evelyn de Morgan is almost a comedy of absurd failures -- but they achieved something else, and maybe it's in their failures as businesspeople that we find their greatest legacy of success as human beings.

Tansy Gold