August 16, 2001

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You have arrived at an entry being written by a person whose mind is more on crafts items than on much else. Be warned!

I am thinking up some ready-made things, rather than custom work, for the upcoming crafts fair. I will still be happy to do custom things, but I thought it would make sense, especially at a heavy-duty gifting time, to come up with some things ready to ship. So that's on the agenda right now.

Also in terms of crafts, and perhaps why I'm having a hard time thinking about something other than that subject, is the notion of buy-sell that's rearing its head on the crafters mailing list again. There are tons of posts to the list...seventy-five came through yesterday, and a good 90 percent of those were about buy-sell. People are intensely passionate about that. As I've said before, it can be an issue for a lot of people.

The one person whose post got the most attention yesterday tries to straddle the fence---she augments her handmade items with stuff she imports when she does craft shows. As you can imagine, those against the selling of buy-sell items at crafts shows did not think that was a good thing.

I'm not sure how we got into calling it buy-sell. What it is is importing crafts items from some foreign country (most often China these days), and reselling it here. In other circles, it's just called importing. But that sounds a little too classy for what we who make our own are fussing about, so the rather more disparaging term gets used.

As I said in the earlier piece, I agree that there is room in the economy for all. I do wish the buy-sell people would go somewhere besides crafts shows. And again, I urge you to support handcrafters whenever you have the chance.