Craft Revival: The Post-Etsy Handmade Economy

Abstract

Craft, the handmade and making are currently everywhere. As Jakob has observed, `No longer a sequestered and quaint domestic leisure activity, crafts and DIY …have redefined their images and social stigmas with progressive agendas of emancipation, individualization, sub-cultural identification and anti-commercialism as well as emerged as a multibillion-dollar industry' (2013, p. 127). That is, `Crafts are currently being rediscovered not only as a hobby but also as a desirable enterprise' (Jakob 2013, p. 127). For this reason I begin this chapter, perhaps a little counter-intuitively, with a different kind of `craft': the making and selling of alcohol. Though prima facie this may appear a strange starting point from which to begin our journey into the contemporary craft economy, given the last few years have also witnessed an explosion of craft micro-brewing around the industrialised world, in many ways it is inevitable that these paths cross. Within the space of a single week I came across two separate instances where yarn-based craft was employed to market alcohol. The first was the unlikely sight of a crocheted label on a draught cider tap for Matilda Bay's Dirty Granny Matured Apple Cider behind the bar at a local pub.1 Photographs of similar crochet labelling feature on other aspects of this product packaging such as bottles and boxes. In many ways this is a `jumped the shark' moment for the contemporary craft renaissance.