Sustainable Living Homestead Products | Self-sufficient Homesteading

Featuring brand new old fashioned vintage products used in the sustainable living Amish communities for the sustainable home, farm, garden, ranch and hunter.

Cottage Craft Works www.cottagecraftworks.com offers an emporium of old fashioned non-electric human powered products that were being used in almost every household at the turn of the century.

The online general store is like thumbing through an early 1900 Sears and Roebuck catalog. You will be amazed at the old time products that are still being made like butane clothes irons, oil lamps, treadle sewing machines, push garden cultivators, to hand crank kitchen appliances. You will find almost every item you will need for the homestead or for an off-grid self-sufficient lifestyle.  You will even find such things USA hand turned old fashioned blue stripe pottery bowls and crocks made using no lead or cadmium.

A large selection of hunting gear including hunting calls, USA made hunting apparel and even replacement gun stocks have been gathered here all in one place.

The folks at Cottage Craft Works have spent over 30 years exploring the various Amish communities going deep into the back roads mostly frequented by horse and buggies. They have found these old time products still being manufactured and used in the Amish communities. In many cases they are the only place online that you will be able to find some of the products they feature like a hand crank conversion Kitchen Aid Mixer, or a hand crank mini pie maker.

Many of the Amish products fall right into place for the sustainable homestead since the Amish follow such a simple back to basics sustainable lifestyle themselves.  Because the Amish have such large families you will find canning and kitchen wares made to process and produce small to large batches of food quickly. An all stainless steel water bath canner will process up to 15 quart mason jars at one time. Outdoor wood fired canners are capable for canning up to 30 quarts at one time.

In earlier times it was very common for families and neighbors to come together and share in the harvest.  The Amish still use this resource in canning and butchering.  The modern homesteader can do the same sharing in the cost of some of these Amish made products.

Cottage Craft Works provides an important economic impact to over 100 Amish owned shops across the Midwest. While 90% of the products come from small Amish shops and factories, other small American cottage based products are also featured hence, the company name Cottage Craft Works.

These are small American businesses where the owner(s) still touch the products they sale.

Not only are the majority of the products USA Amish made, they are made for a lifetime of use. The Amish just make things to last and have never tried to figure out how to make things that will break so that you have to come back and buy another one in a few years.  They also don’t make frequent model changes so that you can still get parts long down the road.  Cottage Craft Works also has parts available for the old Even Heat clothes irons, Heller Aller water well pumps, Coleman lanterns and White Mountain ice cream freezers just to name a few.

For the backyard homestead you will want to check out the popular heavy duty roller egg chicken nesting boxes.  These Amish made nesting boxes provide a protected compartment for the eggs to roll into as soon as the chicken lays them  resulting in fewer damaged eggs and much less labor in cleaning them.  If you have an egg eater in the flock these nesting boxes will likely take care of that.

One of the issues a new homesteader faces is copycat duplicate products being cheaply made overseas. The common hand crank egg beater is a great example.  You can purchase an imported egg beater for under $20 take it home and after the first time of use wonder how anyone could have survived using one of these. The gears don’t mesh well making them hard to crank.  In contrast the Amish made Country Egg Beater is a reproduction from the old fashioned Dazey Egg Beaters. They crank smoothly and are easy to use and clean. They will cost close to four times of one of the imported ones but they will provide a lifetime of daily use instead of cluttering up the kitchen drawers with unused items.

Hand push garden cultivators are another great example. You can purchase an imported copy of the high wheel garden cultivator.  While they might work fine for a small back yard garden, the serious homesteader depending on harvesting fresh food for the family table will soon find out that they are made light weight and take a lot of effort to push down to cultivate the garden.  The imported steel cutters are not as sharp and they use cheaper metals making them harder to keep a good cutting edge.  In contrast the Hoss Wheel Hoe garden cultivators are reproductions of the famous Planet Junior Cultivators widely used at the turn of the Century. They are USA made and also built to last a lifetime of use for the large homestead garden.

Many ladies are purchasing the reproduction treadle sewing machine cabinets along with the newer Janome 712T treadle sewing machine.  For many they learned to sew from their mothers or grandmother on these old fashioned treadle sewing machines and feel they can better control the speed of the sewing machine.  Many still have the old Singer Class 15 sewing machine passed down to them but the cabinet was long destroyed. Those will just purchase a new Amish treadle cabinet from Cottage Craft Works to put the machine back into service.

Cottage Craft Works in one of the remaining places where you can still purchase old fashioned USA made pottery water coolers and water bottle dispensing crocks. A petty important item as we face the uncertainties in the quality of domestic water supplies.

Many people are turning back into time to become more sustainable and self-sufficient.  The desire is being driven by many different factors. While many are turning backyard lawns into vegetable gardens and chicken coops fearing the safety of the Nations food change, others are preparing for a time where the vulnerable electric grid may be taken out by a man made or storm disaster. Others just want to get out of the economic rat race and return the family to a more wholesome simpler time as they grew up in. Some just want to save energy and reduce their carbon footprint.

Then there’s the unsettling world economy and threats of terrorism bringing uncertainties of being able to continue the modern lifestyle that so many have become so dependent on. If a minor short term electrical outage is any indication of just how dependent we have become on computers and the grid; perhaps preparing to be less dependable on the gird does makes a great deal of sense.

One thing is for sure our environment along with the grid is becoming more unstable with wide spread devastating storms hitting our country leaving people without power for weeks into months.

Whatever you define sustainable self-sufficient living as Cottage Craft Works unique gathering of products will fill most any sustainable living need. 

Unlike stockpiling items with a shelf life these are products that can be used every day and keep on using them for years to come regardless what may be in the future. Many of these products even work better and quicker than their cheapened down electrical counterparts.

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