Crafts and Gratitude

I seem to be in a very thankful mood tonight. I posted to my Prayers area along that line and here I am, in the Craft area, in the same mood. I was reminiscing about the 1940s and even 1950s in Philly. I was only a young girl in the 40s and a teen in the 50s, but I remember well the trouble my DM went through just getting craft supplies.

Many a time I went with her by bus and subway to a yarn store in Center City. In those days, there were always bins of yarns that were not in neat pull-skeins. She'd buy them, get them home, and open the "hank" of yarn, making a great loop out of it, drop it over the back of a chair, and I'd begin winding a giant ball. Well, it was "giant" to my little fingers.

Patterns were not available online; you picked up magazines or went to the library, again usually by way of public transportation. Keep in mind these trips took hours, not minutes.

Selling your handmade items was tricky, too. Most was by word of mouth for my DM.

I don't think most handcrafters today realize how fortunate they are to be able to "window shop," and even buy and pay, online, for supplies and patterns. Or how lucky they are to have places like Etsy and eBay, and digital cameras with instant uploads for photos of their work. I do not even want to go into how long it took to get photos back, in those days.

Yes, in many ways, I do miss the innocence of those days, but I am very grateful for our high technology. And I am grateful enough to thank our Creator for the intelligence he gave the programmers and developers and web hosts and more, who make it available to us.