Etsy, the online craft destination, has about 200,000 sellers and over 2.5 million items for sale. Its success reflects a definite resurgence in the popularity of home-made articles recently, a trend that taps into both consumers desire to tighten their budgets and their disenchantment with mass-market products. But this craft renaissance is nothing new…every decade had its do-it-yourselfers and today’s VPOD features one of their creations: a completed 1980s Patricia Smith Moon Bag hand-needlepointed from one of her kits.

Each one of these bags is totally unique as the crafter would choose the needlepoint canvas, then select her own colored yarn and then select the lacquered plaque to accompany it. After hours of painstaking work, the crafter would send off the pieces to Patricia Smith Moon Bags, they’d complete the assemby, and voila! A one-of-a-kind bag would be shipped back to the crafter.

So if, like moi, you don’t have a couple extra hours a week to stitch up your own personal treasures, there are still a few of these completed mini-masterpieces available in the marketplace.

And they’re easy-breezy summer handbag finds for a vintage fashionista!

Available at Vintage in Style.

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