Home-Grown, Hand-Made

It is a wonder to see how few handmade products are currently produced in the United States. These days, if you want anything handmade, you are often forced to settle for products produced in places such as India and China.

It is amazing to think of the number of hours of our lives are spent surfing the web and watching TV. While some intrepid entrepeneurs manage to produce a product, or gain income from their indeavors, the vast majority write off those many hours of "leisure time" participating in activities which show no result for their efforts (or lack thereof).

I actually miss (in a vicarious, before-my-time sort of way) the idea of gathering together to actually make something - to leave a social event with tangible evidence that my time was well invested. I long for the longer, slower days where people would actually create something from basically nothing.

Perhaps this is where the many scrapbooking clubs and the drive to make handmade greeting cards comes . . . not only from a sense of thriftiness, but also from the idea that creating something by hand is actually a valuable skill.

Just thoughts to ponder over the course of the day - how much could one accomplish if time spent in front of media devices (the pablum of the current generation) could be somehow otherwise spent in productive pusuits?