A Plague of Creativity: My Favorites on Etsy

It's like an experimental window-shopping excursion gone completely mad: etsy.com

Images and links and ideas and accomplishments litter the highway of my brain with inspiration and wishful wonder, filling page after page with images I can't bring myself to delete just in case the person who created or posted the item needs reassurance that someone likes it, even if the money isn't there to buy it. This time around, my fetish for favorites is at a downright docile 70 or so pages; there have been times when it has crested the 400 mark. The fun part is going through later and deleting the items that have been sold or removed. It is reassuring somehow that, even though my own items don't sell very well or often, other people's DO. While paring down my list yesterday, I found someone who had over 50 thousand sales completed with a 100% approval rating, which is no small feat!

In addition to the items I find and drool over and enjoy, I also mark shops as favorites. That pile of favorites has over 700 pages accumulated, and is harder to go through and get rid of. It is a good indicator of the state of shopping at the moment, though. The number of shops that are empty or on vacation or simply missing from the ranks is astonishing; two years ago this was a rare occurrence. While I know that it has partly to do with the advent of competitive sites, I firmly believe it has more to do with the deterioration of our economy than anything else. Handmade and homemade are a specialty market, and despite being more unique and attractive to the buyer, they do tend to be more expensive than mass-produced and mass-marketed items. At a certain economic point, handmade and homemade become symbols of what they really are: An art form whose foundation is a labor of love.

Unlike bidding sites like eBay, sales on Etsy are strictly priced according to what the seller wants to charge. A one-of-a-kind hand-cut paper book like Arbouricon I by PistolesPress is priced according to the artist's estimation of value. It is an amazing work of art, valued by its creator, as opposed to being bid on and possibly sold at a price drastically below even the cost of labor and materials. A sculpture set like "How the outside can tell how you feel inside," by ArtMind is also incredibly unique and worth the listing price. These items were among the first I found when visiting Etsy; they are still for sale and probably will be until I win the lottery, at which point I will get to see them in person if someone else has not already done so. But I would not have it any other way; they are constant and reassuring reminders to me of what made me fall in love with this artist's market in the first place.

Another aspect of Etsy that I genuinely appreciate and find causes exponential growth of my favorite lists is the astounding variety of creative endeavors to be found there. Every other item brings some kind of new idea or technique to mind for me to try. I spend a lot of time looking at supplies and thinking about what I would do with them; I spend time figuring out how things are made or simply admiring the fact that someone has the patience and ability to create something I have previously never even conceived of. Really it has contributed rather evilly to my sense of creative failure; I come up with dozens of ideas and methods, and I want to learn how to do all these things that other people are doing, but there are not enough hours in the day and not enough energy in my limbs to follow through. Drifting up from the depths of high school and college memories come those voices that occasionally haunt me, "why can't you choose just one? just pick one to be good at and stick with it..." but I just can't do it. I can't pin myself down to any single method or endeavor; what if I miss something? what if the next thing I try gives me the ability to make something even more beautiful or interesting than I envisioned? how do I possibly say no to that kind of wonder?

Which brings us back to my original lament... too many interests and not enough time. Thus the petition for more hours in the day and the plea for a thousand-year lifespan - hopefully one day enough signatures will accumulate to convince the Universe to grant me my wish!