Site of the Month: etsy.com

We have a biggie for you this month! Some of you may already be Etsy converts, and some may be uninitiated - but Etsy really is a way of life and a great way to accent your home design in a unique way.

Etsy is pretty much an open craft fair, but with plenty of products made by professionals, from new materials with excellent skills! Most of the products on Etsy are handmade, but there are some machine made items, or items that are sourced from somewhere other than the direct seller and their ‘handmade’ status can’t be verified.

You can choose to search for a term within the handmade section, the supplies section, or the vintage section, where most of the products are found or bought antiques.While not many of the products on Etsy are necessary in a home, there are plenty of trinket, accessory or art-type objects. Some of the categories include:
•    Homewares
•    Quilts
•    Toys
•    Woodworking
•    Jewelry
•    Glass
•    Bath and beauty
•    Art
•    Accessories

While Etsy is not where you’d go for the skeletal elements of your interior design, or major defining items, it has plenty of choice for accents and accessories in the home. There is also an extensive range of handmade clothing, hats and shoes.

One of the features of Etsy that we like best is the Shop by Color option - a screen filled with a spectrum of dots appears, and as you scroll over them they appear large then fade away like bubbles drawn with a wand … sort of entrancing in itself! You can forget that you are supposed to be looking for something to spend money on Click on the colour that you want and several product options pop up in miniature picture version. You can then grab and drag these all over the screen, clicking on the ones you’d like to see more of for a short description. Very cool! Not to mention practical - most of our interior design decisions are based on the colour of an item, so it makes sense that you should be able to sort items by colour.

The design of this screen is quite similar to Etsy’s Time Machine screen, with a similar flying picture, click-drag-and-drop system. Even the flash player loading symbol is very cool and artsy, with a spectrum of colors that build, rotating around the centre, rather than that boring old circular, notched sort of default Adobe design! When you grab a product to look at it, the description comes up in a tag-like illustration which sways as you move it around. Spunky!

Etsy recently had its two-millionth sale, and if you are looking for individual pieces for your home, value your uniqueness, or just want to find some cute natural products to waste your paypacket on, Etsy is a sweet, individual, unique place! Items on Etsy start from less than a dollar and range into the thousands, and shipping costs are quite reasonable.