More than just handmade scarves and doctored '50s prom dresses, the made-by-me movement is about almost everything that can be produced at home. The popular Web site Getcrafty.com offers tutorials on how to turn an old record into a flowerpot, paint racing stripes on your car or cook up a fruit acid skin peel -- interjected with pro-grrrl rants about financial independence and reflections on domesticity and "Mom's influence."

And the glossy magazine ReadyMade, which launches in July, will offer "instructions for everyday life" to youthful do-it-yourselfers. It will target the same kind of design-savvy crowd that drools over Wallpaper magazine and can identify an Arne Jacobsen swan chair at 50 paces, an eclectic audience that wants to make something that their friends will admire for its cool cleverness, like a bed based on a meat cart, or a wallet assembled from a discarded Fed-Ex packet.

This is a newly affluent generation persuaded by disposable income and hip shelter magazines like Dwell and Nest to be obsessed with the aesthetics of the home. Since cookie-cutter consumerism makes it difficult to be unique when everyone is buying the same Pottery Barn place mats, the new crafties have found a way to express individuality, showcase personal design sensibilities and make a small statement against conspicuous consumption by taking production into their own hands. (And, considering the dot-com downturn, there is a certain financial imperative to homemaking, although more often than not it costs just as much to make something as to buy it.)

"It's about a punk identity," asserts Jean Railla, the editor of Getcrafty.com. "It's about not wanting to be mainstream."

Perhaps ironically, the new craft crowd looks to Martha Stewart as a patron saint. Despite her harpy reputation and Hamptons-appropriate projects, Stewart has elevated the happy homemaker to hipness. This is a woman, after all, who has become one of the most powerful female businesswomen in the world while baking cakes that look like vegetable gardens and making drink coasters out of pansies.

"Not only is Martha Stewart driving this reinvigoration of the domestic arts, but she's repositioning it," explains Stoller. "In the '60s and '70s this was all about making a good life for your husband and your kids. But Martha Stewart is doing it for herself; she doesn't even have a husband and kids at home -- she does it for the fulfillment and the joy of having a nice home."

Stewart advocates simplicity as an aesthetic more than a way of life. She pursues perfection more than peace; her projects display the gloss of graceful ease while disguising impossibly difficult, and frequently expensive, processes. And the final image -- the look -- is everything.

But the new DIY movement is also about simplicity in opposition to fussiness. As she takes the time to make a few objects that are unique and iconic, the average youthful DIYer is living in a railroad flat in downtown Manhattan or San Francisco, more concerned with the best way to mask the scent of cat urine emanating from the downstairs apartment than building a perfect rake for spring gardening. It's less about bourgeois perfection and superficiality, and more about making a unique, individual statement. Still a little selfish, but not, perhaps, quite so traditionally pretentious.

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