Have You Heard of ByHand.me?

For those who love all that is handmade, there is another site for us to find and drool over handmade goodness from a variety of online venues. That site is ByHand.me. What exactly is ByHand.me? According to the site it is handmade items, handmade artisans, handmade code, and handmade friendships. This is the revolution of the handmade playground. It starts with a simple guy, Adam, also known on Etsy and Artfire as infivision. He decided he wanted a better social community to promote handmade. While ning offers this to some extent, he felt it was too generic and has a poor user interface. In a quest for something better he developed http://byhand.me. Designed and created in under a week and for under $100 - ok so he had to purchase the domain and a security certificate - ByHand serves as a free social network for those who make handmade and those who buy handmade. Here's a run down of what you can expect from the site:

* Artisan Directory
* Spotlights
* Forums
* Member Blogs
* Social Networking
* Chat
* Private Messaging
* RSS Feeds
* And more..

I recently became a member and am loving it. One of my favorite things to do is create a Spotlight. Spotlights allow you to curate nine items in a gallery format. This allows you to pull items from multiple venues and create what Etsy calls a "treasury" of handpicked items that you'd like to show off to the world. Spotlights never expire, and only are removed when you choose to delete it. Here's one I created with my items:


There's even a blog that features Spotlights that have been created on ByHand.me called Found-Handmade. I'm actually one of the publishers on this new blog and post at least one Spotlight a day that catches my eye. I've found quite a few new favorite shops from perusing the Spotlights.

So if you're a big fan of all that is handmade, swing by ByHand.me and check it out! You won't be disappointed. :)