For we country town girls in the 1960s, clad in neatly tailored outfits cut and stitched by a loving mother and her sewing machine, there was nothing so desirable as a store bought dress.  For handmade read homemade, unsophisticated, poor.  Now, though, handmade is cutting edge.  What's more, it is about far more than simply fashioning a new dress, with self-described craftivists using their craft work as a means of political expression.  And so, for example, the "seriously seditious stitching" of Melbourne's Rayna Fahey, of RadicalCrossStitch.com, means an immaculately stitched sampler is more likely to say "please don't bleed on the carpet" than "home sweet home".

Handmade has become a loaded word.  Once a simple denoter of home production versus factory manufacture, in recent years it has gathered inferences ranging from ways of demonstrating love to concern for the environment and attitudes to mass production.

This is the focus of Making it Handmade, a 55 minute documentary by Melbourne filmmaker Anna Brownfield which focuses on four craftivists, not only to illuminate this new movement, but to open up a broader discussion about craft as a means of political expression and what happens when the handmade becomes commercially desirable.

Etsy.com, the online marketplace for the handmade which began as a homespun venture six years ago and now has 125 staff, five million members and investment from venture capitalists, comes under scrutiny.

Brownfield, who graduated from RMIT with honours in media arts in 1997 and teaches at Swinburne University's film course, is best known for her award-winning feminist erotica.  But the filmmaker, who knits and sews and arrived at the Melbourne Film Festival premiere of this, her first feature length documentary, with her hair pinned up by knitting needles, discovered the craftivist community online.  Through MySpace she met Gemma Jones and her Kaotic Kraft Kuties who feature in Making it Handmade - we see them making aprons (not ones you'd want to wear when grandma comes to dinner).

"I found there were all these women taking part and introducing a modern aesthetic like skulls.  They were using traditional craft techniques and subverting them in some way," Brownfield says.  "A lot of the craft I see, it is about being precise and correct in your technique and I like that a lot of the people I chose (for the movie) were not about that, they were about having fun and exploring it... Everything does not have to be perfect.

"It is not like past generations where everything handmade had to look like it was machine made.  But the more I researched the more I realised that there has been this desire for the handmade and that now large companies are taking the aesthetic - for example, knits from Target that look as though they are handknitted; printed fabrics and shower curtains from IKEA that look like patchwork."

The craft work featured in Brownfield's doco is a far cry from this: we see the Melbourne Radical Craft Circle using their fingers to cross stitch the words "I wanna live here" on a cyclone fence surrounding a vacant block in west suburban Footscray one cold winter's night; and in a city bar Casey Jenkins' Trashbag Rehab group is giving new life to recycled craft supplies by fashioning vaginas to fling over inner-city power lines - a variation on flinging sneakers over the lines, known as "c*nt flinging" which she says is a way for women to "penetrate the man dominated world of street art".

When Brownfield decided she wanted to document this indie craft movement, she was unable to raise funds.  So, in the spirit of the movement, she decided to do it herself, using income generated from her other work and her awards money.  It took three years, shooting on a Panasonic AG-HPX172EN P2 camera, HD tapeless, borrowed from Swinburne.

"I wanted to look at how it has moved from something that was created in the home and considered to have no commercial value and whether it was possible to make a living from making things by hand," she says.  "I was interested to see where that was going and also that while there is a move by society towards buying things that are handmade, it is a lot more expensive.  Is our society still driven by economics?  If so, why would I buy a hand knitted jumper when I can buy something from Kmart or Target for half the price?

"I want to look at things like Wal-Mart realising that there was money to be made here and wanting to be part of that."

Brownfield's reference to American department store giant Wal-Mart relates to the controversial US$27 million investment in Etsy in 2008 by venture capitalists, including Accel Partners, whose Jim Breyer joined the Etsy board.  He also sits on other boards, including Wal-Mart. Announcing this investment in January 2008, Etsy founder Rob Kalin outlined ambitious plans, a far cry from its homespun image, including a search engine comparable to Google, supporting other languages and currencies and investment in hardware.

In July last year CNN reported that Etsy, which takes 3.5 percent of sales it facilitates, had raised more than 30 million in capital since 2006, with investors having valued the firm at US$100 million.  A month later Kalin announced more financing -  US$6.3 million from venture capitalists, the amount spent on servers in the past five years, he says.  It was a big call from a business whose homepage features oatmeal whippie pie cookies, pencils made from recycled paper and a kitchen measurements chart.

But although Etsy brags that its top sellers earn six-figure incomes, and Kalin's stated goal was "to empower people to make a living making things", CNN reported that for most sellers the Etsy earnings could only be a sideline.

And for those managing to make a crust, there is a problem Brownfield touches on in her documentary: the endless drudgery of making the same thing over and over.  As many Australian craftspeople struggling to make a living know, it can become a chore that degrades the value of the handmade.

Brownfield had begun her movie before she discovered that US indie craft queen Faythe Levine had her own, Handmade Nation, underway.  Brownfield focused more on the notion of subversive craft, but interviewed Levine who told her the monotony of making things repeatedly had taken much of the joy out of her own craft work.

It is here that the skill of artisans in Asian countries comes to the fore, with outsourcing for low wages, not only by major department stores and fashion labels but by some smaller designer-makers - or former makers.  So if that jumper is handknitted, but it is made in China through a production line system that sees members of different villages knit every piece, with one village knitting sleeves all day, another sweater backs, what merit is there in buying handmade that is a form of mass production?

Kevin Murray's Craft Unbound posts recently addressed this issue in the context of the Australia-India Design Platform, which aims to build a common understanding between Australia and India about how designers and artisans might work productively together, with the goal of a Code of Practice for Creative Collaborations. Read more at http://kitezh.com/partnerships/australia-india-design-platform.

But if many Asian workers are treated like human cogs in a machine, it's a feeling some Etsy sellers share.  Etsy's capital fundraising has led to a backlash by some of its artisans against its commercialisation, leading to the establishment of other, more collaborative sales sites and of Etsy Bitch, a blog offering venting opportunities for the disaffected.  The blog's response to Kalin's post about the August 2010 fundraising was: "What our precious little red-headed fiend neglected to mention was that the latest round of funding was $20 million and that Etsy is now valued at $300 million because it sold more than $130 million in goods in the first 6 months of 2010.

"And yet there's no customer service department, no real new checkout that's acceptable, no coupon codes, no sale mode, no batch edit... Etsy will make roughly $5-10 per member this year ($30-50 million total, ~$12 per shop on the site)."

The writer, signed the Righteous One, whose tirade was backed by angry supporters, accused Kalin of preparing the company to go public: "He failed to mention that admin no longer serve the customers, they serve the investors."

Brownfield, who says she has so much material she is contemplating a television series proposal, says that for the craft subversives she documented the benefits were the opposite of the Etsy backbiting: "I went to someone's house with people I did not know, but you felt like you were part of something with a sense of community about it and I think that is what happens to people doing craft, this sense of community.

"It is also about intergenerational skill sharing.  With feminism and the idea that domestic craft became about the subjugation of women, a lot of these skills were not passed on anymore.  This skill sharing is now happening online, for example through YouTube tutorials.  A lot of these people are bloggers or they read blogs, but then they come together for real with this common love and it is about human contact."

Making it Handmade is available for purchase on DVD for $15 at http://poisonappleproductions.bigcartel.com/product/making-it-handmade