I have written here before about the design blog Poppytalk because the site has a fabulous and whimsical eye for everything from stationary and Christmas ornaments to shelving and chairs, with a focus on items that are handmade and often organic. Well, in case you hadn’t heard, times are tough and, if you haven’t walked into a CVS recently and beheld the mandatory seasonal decorations, it’s that time of year. Of course, because times are tough, the holiday shopping I’m doing this year is on a tight budget. That doesn’t mean, however, that the gifts need to be lame or boring (Soap? Snore.), which is where Poppytalk comes in.
The woman behind Poppytalk also has a website called Poppytalk Handmade which, every month, presents a curated “online street market” that features “handmade and vintage goods from around the world,” and this site is my starting place this year for holiday shopping. Each month the site changes its curated theme.
For example, as I write this, the theme is Holiday and Gift Theme, but on December 15, the theme will change to “Holiday Madness and Boxing Week Sale.” Similar, but different, since the vendors will switch and there will be a new influx of inventory. The vendors include fine artists, jewelers, industrial designers and textile designers, and the prices are totally doable, even in this economy. After much hemming and hawing about what to get for whom, I’ve finally decided to concentrate my shopping in the fine art department, and to get a bunch of my favorite people pretty little prints (the site features Etsy celebrities Olive Dear, Lisa Congdon and Artstream, among others) for around $25 so that my friends can worry about the expensive part: the framing.