Beautiful crafts

When I was a kid, I loved reading through my Mom's Family Circle and Mother's Day magazines. In those days, the magazines were not obsessed, as they are today, with diets, make-up, and various personal and national crises. Instead, they had recipes and tons of crafts. I would page through the magazines endlessly dreaming of doing this craft or the other. I eventually realized that I enjoy thinking about crafts, but not actually doing them.

Now, the women's magazines pretty much ignore crafts, leaving that subject to very expensive and narrowly focused magazines. Fortunately for us, though, there's the internet. I've found some truly fascinating and beautiful stuff on the internet.

One of the loveliest sites I've found is something called A Rose By Name, whose proprietress is a beader. Not only does she showcase her own work, she showcases other people's as well, with a series of really lovely photographs. I'm too old and wise by now to have any illusions that I'll ever do that kind of work myself, but it is certainly a pleasure to look at the work that others do.