Craft as medicine

Photos from the artisan market | The path is the point

Hello! A brief update:

The craft show was a success! Lots of sales and good conversations. I’m looking forward to attending another one in the future.

The effervescent and outgoing Josiah spent the day with me (sporting his cooking apron to better look the part of woodworking underling!). I doubt I’ll convince him to join me on every craft show outing, but it was nice to spend the time together basking in the glow of my creativity. (Right, Josiah??) Side note: most people thought he was the woodworker.

Prior to the event, I worried about packing the items for buyers. Basically I hadn’t thought beyond making items. So my mom, who is in town for the holidays, offered to create custom-sized bags for each item. She bought material at Goodwill and worked like a shop elf for three days cutting and sewing fabric. (She did take breaks for meals and rest.) The kids flitted in and out of the room offering minimal helpfulness and plenty of opinions. It was a whole family affair!

On a non-show note, a friend sent this photo a few days ago:

One of my babies! Out in the world! This is a board I made for my friend to give as a gift to her daughter in law. I love seeing the stuff I’ve made all grown up and out making the world a better place.

My essay is below. I hope the next couple of weeks are filled with good food, good conversations, and as much help from shop elves as you can get! ❤️

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The point is the path

“When you have craft, you have medicine. I’m talking whether it’s darning, beading, sewing, baking, cooking, singing, whatever it is that you have—if you invest in that, it will give you everything. It will carry you through just about everything if you have craft.”

These words, hastily scribbled down in my journal, were shared by Richard Van Camp during a lecture on storytelling and gifts I attended online a couple weeks ago. Van Camp is a storyteller and author and member of the Dogrib (Tłı̨chǫ) Nation from Fort Smith, NWT, Canada. He told me that this teaching came from WD (or Bill) Valgardson, his professor at the University of Victoria.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking about the quiet benefits people get from doing craft work. The benefits we get not from the end product but from the process of creation itself. What we learn about ourselves, about the rest of the world, the ways it doesn’t bend to our will, even if we’ve managed to achieve masterful skill in a particular area.

To put it another way: What’s the point of making something by hand that is easier, quicker, and cheaper to buy from a store or big company?

I believe that the point of such work is the path to its creation. The journey from idea to reality. We are as transformed by the process as we are transforming materials into something useful or artful.

Van Camp summed up eloquently what my mind has been dancing around: Craft is medicine. We humans need to create much more than we need to be served up creations.

It could be writing, sewing, quilting, pottery, glassblowing. There are so many ways to create, so many media to explore. We create to express joy, to highlight injustice, to point out blindspots in our culture, to make another person feel loved, or simply because we need a table or blanket. And for many other reasons.

Right now I’m creating to heal, because life has knocked our family down a bit and the only sense I can make is through my work in the shop. I’m not fancy or rich or smart enough to make sense any other way, certainly not to influence anyone else. But I can see a piece of wood and imagine a new life for it into being. And through that process, I can mend some of the broken bits in my own life.

When we work by hand, we walk this delicate balance between control and powerlessness. If we’ve done this work for a bit, we might have a sense of how it’ll go, but inevitably big and little things spring up that we didn’t account for. A twist in the board we were planning to use. Running out of finish. A slight miscalculation that makes the joint too small or too loose.

Yes, we can have backups. Yes, we can double check our numbers. Yes, we can try to plan ahead better.

But really the question is: How well can we dance with the unknown?

Days before attending Van Camp’s lecture, I was jotting down the many benefits of making stuff by hand (even if it never moves beyond the pursuit of a hobby).

These include:

getting comfortable with making (and fixing!) mistakes

gaining self-efficacy and confidence in your ability to find your ass with your own two hands

developing a new perspective on the goods you use in everyday life, on your values, on your aesthetics and style, on your creativity

detoxing from fake, synthetic, digital life

embracing the messiness of the creative process

gaining more strength in mindfulness

learning to trust your own eye, hand, and mind

And you? What would you add to this list? What benefits do you get from creating something new?

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Market

Looking for a gift for yourself or a friend? I have a few items left for sale—I put them up on my website.