A 'make your own' movement rising

By Pat Brennan
The Orange County Register

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Maybe it's the economy. Or the fact that fewer can afford a brand-new Prius. The trend, in any case, is upon us: do-it-yourself green living.

Soap, candles, purses, T-shirts: each week, the green-minded gather at the Road Less Traveled store in Santa Ana for classes on fashioning a variety of common household products from environmentally friendly materials — items that might otherwise require a hunting expedition through the aisles of Wal-Mart.

"Part of the green movement is making things yourself," says Delilah Snell, the store's owner. "Repurposed used items, collages, pillowcases, aprons, transformed tees. We teach people how to make their own fashions."

And while the trend has been growing for the past few years, Snell said the recent economic downturn, which also is keeping people at home, might be fueling greater interest.

"Craft mafias" and online sites like Etsy, a forum for buying and selling handmade items, have caught fire in recent years, says Victor Domine, spokesman for the Craft and Hobby Association — so much so that the group hosted a green-themed trade show in Anaheim in January.

"Instead of a blue-haired old woman being the crafting market, there's now a horn-rimmed glasses, tattooed demographic," Domine said. "And they're creative — what some are calling the creative lifeblood of craft."

They're known as "indy crafters" and are the folks who knit iPod covers instead of crochet poodles, he said, as well as a variety of other products useful around the home: repurposing jeans and sweaters, or fusing plastic bags to make jackets — often with their own irreverent sense of style.

For many in this group, often people 30 and under, the environment is a high priority.

His association is still gathering data to determine whether the recession is providing a boost to home crafting, but one early figure is telling: in a 2008 holiday season online survey by Michaels Stores Inc., 58 percent out of a pool of 1,000 survey respondents said they were more likely to make gifts for the holidays than they had been the year before, while large margins also said they were cutting back on travel, toys and electronics.

For Snell, the trend seems obvious, as the crafting classes conducted by her niece, Nicole Stevenson, as well as home-grown food classes, are getting more crowded.

"There's such a strong response," she said. "People are making their own things again. It's getting bigger because of the economic situation; it's coming out of local economies embraced by young people getting back to their roots."