Etsy

I have to say I love the Etsy website. I have actually been slightly obsessed with it lately. It is a website "to buy and sell all things handmade." This includes everything from original artwork, to clothing, toys, jewelry, and just about anything else you can imagine. It is a great way for me to online shop -- except that I don't actually buy everything I like, I just save my favorites and enjoy looking at them! Saves a LOT of money.


Not only are the handmade items sold on the site (for the most part) beautiful, but the site itself is also really neat-o. When you want to shop, you can choose from several different ways to search through the items offered. You can search by category, by color, by location of the artist creating the work, by "time machine" -- or when the items were posted, and several other ways.


My personal favorite is the "suggestions" generator. As you are browsing through you can mark things as a favorite and then when you click on the suggestions generator, it produces a list of things you might like based on your saved favorites. Sometimes the list it produces contains things you might never even consider buying, but it is interesting nonetheless.


If you want to see an example, one cool "shop" (that is what the sellers are called) that I recently came across is Palumba. Coincidentally, they work out of Ann Arbor, MI. They also have a regular non-Etsy company website, which I visited after drooling over the stuff I was seeing in their Etsy shop. They have lovely, old fashioned-looking wooden toys and cloth dolls, such as this Skittles in a bag set:




Beware, if you haven't looked at Etsy before but you like unique arty things, it can be addictive!