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Etsy gets weird for the weird

Looking for weird stuff on Etsy, the arts-and-crafts community? It's not too hard to find.

 

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Posted on Jun 14, 2011   Updated on Jun 3, 2021, 4:20 am CDT

It’s hard to top doll-arm earrings or an intestine necklace, just some of the outré creations featured on the blog Incredible Things.

But it would appear that Etsy users are trying. Searching the go-to site for handcrafted items for the word “weird” yielded some 25,785 results.

And clearly, only those come from sellers who actually describe their stuff as weird. That means there’s a lot of weird stuff whose creators don’t realize it.

So points to those Etsy creators who do display a sense of self-aweirdness.

That’s only a small fraction of the 9.5 million items that Etsy says are for sale in their marketplace. But that’s still a lot of weird stuff.

In the spirit of investigative journalism, I took a little time out to try to find a few of the strangest items.

Right away, I came across Crime Scene Doll, a black stuffed doll with cute little Xs over its eyes and displayed in the picture with presumably fake blood. (If it’s real, I don’t want to know).

But then, I was stymied by what I now think is just plain old mistake art. You know, stuff that people made that didn’t quite work out, but they thought they could sell anyway? Someone needs to coin a term for this only-on-Etsy genre.

There were a lot of dolls that looked like oopses. And tell me that Weird Wormie was really meant to be a weird wormie and not cute wormie. Or this weird leaking green brooch.

Then there were the truly weird items.

Little Skull Girl and Her Surrogate Mom Doll fits the bill. Or the Real Moose Poop keychain and earrings. (Sarah Palin, are you reading?)

I’ll close this off with the find of the day: Hip Handcrafted Witch Finger Crayons. Can’t you just see your kids’ faces light up with excitement when they unwrap this neat gift?  For the first time in this search, I was tempted to buy. But I didn’t, which means you can.

So now it’s your turn. Post your favorite weird Etsy finds — or tweet them at me.

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*First Published: Jun 14, 2011, 2:47 am CDT