Ever wonder what Martha Stewart is going to give as Christmas gifts this year? Here's her list, and it includes honey from her own bees (capped with beeswax from her own bees, topped with gilded paper, and including a hand-carved wooden honey spoon), tassels made from the hair of her Friesian horse, and vests knit from the fleece from her own sheep.
Not only is this standard of excellence utterly unattainable for most people, it's not even attainable for Martha. Note her use of the passive tense: "Two knit vests were created." Not by her, I can guarantee you that. She owns the sheep, it's true. But someone else sheared them, processed the fleece into yarn, and knit the vests.
This is the type of disingenuous one-upsmanship that the craft world is riddled with, and it has to stop. Crafting is not a competition. And even if it was, Martha Stewart would be disbarred for cheating.
That's the biggest irony: she is the one who almost single-handedly created a national obsession with showing up your peers, this unattainable goal of perfection, and she doesn't even do it. Ever looked at a Martha craft or project and wondered how she does it? She hires people because she's ludicrously wealthy, that's how she does it.
Martha Stewart's empire is essentially built on an upscale, ultra-posh version of buying a cake at the grocery store, putting it on a ceramic cake plate, and passing it off as your own.
And now Martha has gone and dumped on bloggers for "writing recipes that aren't tested, that aren't necessarily very good or are copies of everything that really good editors have created and done." I suppose it's no surprise that the queen of hypocrisy should slam everyone else for doing exactly the same thing she does all the time. But still, enough is enough, Martha. Maybe it's time you retired and gave us all a rest from your nonsense.
Image courtesy Flickr/Buttontree Lane
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