TEND is a line of everyday goods for women structured around the ideologies of homesteading. These 11 multifunctional items serve to help women engage in the everyday, while embodying the core tenets of homesteading including simplification, self-sufficiency, sustainability, and holistic health of the body and the land. In creating this series of products I aim to promote mindful consumerism while encouraging women to create a home outside of home, ensuring wellbeing in day to day life. This concept is encapsulated by the title of my collection TEND: a call to action in tending to yourself, to your community, and to the environment around you.

My love of homesteading and self-sufficiency stems back to a variety of personal and historical influences. These include the Slow Movement, the Voluntary Simplicity Movement and various experiences spent on homesteads across the US and UK. While my core concept and visuals are rooted in the country on a traditional homestead, my audience lives in the city: women who are seeking a way to balance the hectic bustle of their modern lives, overrun with technology and excessive consumerism. TEND serves to alleviate the stress of the city and to encourage my audience to slow down, simplify, and examine the way that they engage with their daily lives.

In creating this series of products I aim to provide the tools to maintain the ideologies of traditional homesteading while engaging in a modern lifestyle – one that is often fast-paced and hectic, taking place outside of the home. In doing so, I hope these goods will facilitate my audience to reclaim their everyday life, encouraging women to venture out of the home, out of their comfort zones, and into a more considered way of living.