Craftfulness: Mend Yourself by Making Things - Hardcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Rosemary Davidson was brought up in County Down, Northern Ireland, along with her three sisters, many dogs, a pet sheep and several cows and horses. From her seamstress grandmother, she learnt to sew, and from her Great aunt Dolly, to knit and bake. From her father she discovered the recipe for itching powder and where to always find tadpoles in spring and wild strawberries in summer. And from her sisters, amongst many other skills, the fine art of leg-wrestling. She now lives in London with her two children and works at Random House, where she heads the Square Peg imprint.

Arzu Tahsin has worked in publishing for over twenty-five years, beginning her career as a temp at Virago and going on to edit and publish outstanding authors such as Khaled Hosseini and Malala Yousafzai. She cannot remember a time she was not working on one craft project or another. From mosaic tiling to Japanese woodblock printmaking to bookbinding, she has found it hard to focus on a single craft, and feels all the better for it.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Integrating mindfulness, neuroscience, positive psychology, and creativity research, Craftfulness offers a thought-provoking and surprising reconsideration of craft, and how making things with our hands can connect us to our deepest selves and improve our well-being and overall happiness.

We should get this out of the way: Craftfulness is not a crafting book. Rather, it is an investigation of the wisdom generations of men and women know to be true: making things is a vital means of self-expression, self-realization, and self-help that sparks the mind, touches the soul, and rejuvenates the spirit.

Process, not product, is the soul of craft practice. Whether you knit, crochet, sculpt, weave, quilt, tat, draw, or bind books, working toward small, attainable goals gives us a sense of purpose, accomplishment, and control that is proven to positively impact our mental health and happiness.

In Craftfulness, Rosemary Davidson and Arzu Tahsin offer a brilliantly reasoned argument in favor of craft and its positive impact on our mental well-being. Weaving personal experiences with the latest science on mindfulness, happiness, and creativity, they illuminate how craft practice reintroduces balance into our lives and habits by cultivating creativity, promoting focus, creating a safe environment for failure, and encouraging us to make peace with imperfection.

Like Matthew B. Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft, Ken Robinson’s Out of Our Minds, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow, Craftfulness helps us to see our world in a new way, offering opportunities to disconnect and pay attention to ourselves.