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.
