Everything Old is New Again

It couldn't be more clear to me that we are in the midst of a homemaking skills revival! It seems everywhere I turn there is some discussion of canning, home gardening, dehydrating, home butchering, bee keeping or home poultry rearing...the list goes on.
As with any culture, the heart lay in its culinary traditions and as we all know there is a food revolution occuring. This revolution has lead us to look back into our past and see how food was once produced and stored. In doing so people are rediscovering a plenitude of traditional skills nearly lost to our consumer culture.

Simultaneously the economy has hit many working families hard and we are having to rethink our standard of living and the meaning of wealth. For me this has meant focusing more of my attention on the home. I am empowering myself and my family through traditional homemaking; food made from scratch, thrift and cleanliness are our top priorities and I know I'm not alone.

In the coming year I look forward to sharing inspiring and useful resources and "how-to's" from my family to yours. I have amassing a library of books on the topic over the past year. My favorite and one that has restored my sanity is, Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture, by Shannon Hayes. I can't say enough about this book. In short the book is a post-feminist study of homemaking and the economic realities of the dual income family. As a woman raised by a feminist mother, I needed this book in order to understand the indispensable role I play as a homemaker in todays world. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have!
Happy New Year

My thought for 2011 is this, the domestic arts are just that- Art.