Stuff crafters will buy / Etsy Thread

[emeeks]

I actually have a customer that comes in from time to time and makes these INCREDIBLY awesome works of art with the scrap I give her. They're so nice, she wouldn't let me take a picture of them. They go on for auction. They're pretty cool though.

All right, you guys made me go look at Etsy. (I'm seriously 100% not-craftsy. I think I was spooked away from even trying anything like that by an aunt who could out-Martha Ms. Stewart herself. My efforts would have looked so lame and pathetic compared with her spectacular feats of transformation. Anyway...back to the subject...)

So of course when I went to check out Etsy, the first search term I put in was "computer." (groan -- hey, I'm nothing if not predictable) There wasn't much that caught my eye, but I did notice some interesting jewelry made from things like circuit boards and chips. I would figure anything pretty -- some of the old ceramic chips with gold, for example -- could be used by jewelry-makers.

There were also some nice clocks made from hard-drive components, sound cards, CDs, even game cartridges. I don't know if this necessarily means Etsy is a good place to try to sell the raw materials to make these things, but it would be pretty easy to make some of this stuff and sell it there. The seller who has the clocks is called GeekGear. He's selling these clocks, which must take a maximum of 1/2 hour to make, at prices from $15 to $30, and he has 2,629 reviews, so he must be moving a lot of merchandise. It's pretty smart. I kinda even want one of those clocks now. :-P

Last but not least, there's the whole keyboard craze. If you're not up on that whole thing, check out the mechanicalkeyboards subreddit, GeekHack, and Deskthority. There are a lot of keyboard-obsessed people out there, and they put a lot of time and money into building new keyboards, modifying existing ones, etc. So if you find a nice mechanical keyboard, obviously, you want to sell that intact. But these key-hounds are now buying things like old laptops, gaming consoles, terminals, etc. just to cannibalize them for their keycaps. So if you ever have something that's not resaleable (or just not worth much) but it has nice keycaps, you can harvest them and sell them. Just be sure to read up on the types of switches people prefer. Keycaps that fit the most popular switches (Alps, for example) will be the most valuable ones.