The closure — the last issue will appear in December — would seem to confirm the notion that women’s much-vaunted post-feminist love of domesticity is a pose. We like retro baby-blue cake tins because they’re lifestyle porn, not because we bake cakes; we have an impressive hoard of glossy cookery books but we’re fans of the ready meal; we have flower-print wellies by the front door but they just get dusty. Who has the time, let alone the inclination, to spend an evening knitting a tea cosy or reorganising their kitchen shelves? The answer to that question, perhaps surprisingly, is millions of women, and the evidence is to be found, as is so often the case, on the internet. There has recently been an explosion of interest in crafts, cookery and other previously rather dated-seeming “women’s interest” activities. The proof? There exist thousands of websites to fuel it. Far from being risibly old-fashioned or nostalgic, the idea of knitting a tea cosy has enormous appeal for a whole generation of young women, as well as older ones.

The websites that cater to interests such as knitting, crochet, sewing, cookery, childcare and those that address more broadly domestic topics such as cleaning tips, how to feed a family on a certain amount of money a day, how to cook Thai food, or how to make cheese, are not the fuddy-duddy, slightly sad places you might imagine them to be. Many look so beautiful that they could win design awards, are written with wit and panache, and are patronised not by old fogeys but by hip young women in their twenties.

(If I’m whetting your palate, try www.knitty.com, www.kiddley.com, www.funwithyarn.com, cupcake crochet at www.twinkiechan.com, www.stitchnbitch.co.uk, www.retro-housewife.com and www.stitchymcyarnpants.com. Aside from these sites and others like them, there are also thousands of blogs about family life — in fact for every blog about somebody’s sex life there are six blogs about homemaking or crafts, which is quite an uplifting thought.) These domestic websites are the tip of a hefty iceberg. Making things has never been so fashionable: every girl about town worth her salt has a little sideline selling home-made furnishings, clothes or accessories online. Fashionable shops such as Liberty in London host knitting evenings, where young women sit making knitwear and chatting. (One of these knitting groups also meets over double vodkas at the Good Mixer pub in Camden, once the hip home of the Britpop revolution; similarly unchintzy knit-meet venues exist all over the country.) Publishers, quick to spot a trend, are churning out books with titles such as Yeah, I Made it Myself: DIY Fashion for the Not Very Domestic Goddess, or AlternaCrafts: 20+ Hi-Style Lo-Budget Projects to Make.

You know something’s a trend when the most fashionable street in Islington, north London, opens a knitting shop, whose (excellent) classes are booked out weeks in advance and whose clientèle is more Miu Miu than macramé. In America, where the new-craft movement originated and where an outspoken love of domesticity has become fashionable rather than semi-shameful, beautiful, inspirational and upmarket magazines such as Real Simple (homemaking) and Cookie (childcare, and published by beady old Condé Nast) have been instant successes.

Family Circle should have taken an exquisite leaf out of their book and given itself a makeover. The reason the magazine is closing down isn’t because there’s no demand for the material it provided — the demand is vast, and other places, the net chief among them, cater to it by providing similar but better content in an entirely modern, visually exciting way that is trendy and so self-confident that it even eschews putting an ironic, semi-apologetic twist on its offerings.

I find it cheering to know that for every young woman saving up for implants and hair extensions, there’s someone having a laugh with their girlfriends and doing something creative.

• Speaking of the internet I see my old friend Gina Ford, the childless baby expert whose methods I personally find both brutal and dubious in the extreme (she threatens to sue me every time I say that, incidentally — full marks for perseverance) has taken exception to some remarks made on the discussion boards of mumsnet.com, an admirable website run by and for parents.

  The remarks in question included a joke about Ford strapping babies to rockets and firing them into Lebanon, some comments about her being cruel and uncaring, and some, apparently, about personal hygiene. Ford found these “very serious and offensive libels against me”, instructed her solicitors and tried to get the website closed down. Yes, the whole thing. Mumsnet has now taken the extraordinary measure of banning any reference to the by now wildly unpopular Ford.

  What is odd is that Ford should be so sensitive to the question of people making defamatory remarks. She doesn’t like it. Fair enough: who does? But if you’re going to be a sensitive little flower you need to be consistent.

  I wonder how Ford explains the fact that the last time I wrote about her, she, or her representatives, urged members of her website to send me their abusive rants by giving them my e-mail address, as well as those of two Sunday Times colleagues.

  I have to say, if the idea was to persuade any of us that her followers are sane and rational people, the plan backfired in spectacular fashion.

  No one, as far as I am aware, threatened to sue her for wounding their delicate sensibilities. And yet last week Ford declared herself so deeply distressed by complete and utter strangers’ badinage that she — self-proclaimed friend to mothers everywhere — tried to shut down a site that 250,000 people use each month to seek and offer advice and help to parents.

  Ford is keen on asking people who bring up her childlessness: “If you’re having a heart operation do you choose the surgeon who has had 10 attacks himself and carried out 20 operations, or the one who has had no attacks and carried out 100?” The question rather presupposes that Gina Ford is, like her rhetorical surgeons, possessed of a heart in the first place. I have my doubts.

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