Craftfulness is the idea that making things with your hands makes you feel better, and can offer the same benefits as mindfulness and meditation, yoga, running, playing an instrument or singing.

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: that 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.

Integrating mindfulness, neuroscience, positive psychology, and creativity research, Rosemary Davidson and Arzu Tahsin explore how the simple act of making something from scratch affects mental well-being, and offer a brilliantly reasoned argument in favor of craft.

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

Davidson and Tahsin illuminate how craft practice re-introduces balance into our lives and our habits by cultivating creativity, carving space for ourselves, promoting focus, creating a safe space for failure, and ultimately, how to make peace with imperfection.

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

Out October 2019

208 Pages Approx.

MY THOUGHTS:

I received this book in exchange for my honest review.

This book nails exactly what I’ve believed for most of my life. First taught as a child that idle hands–the devil commands… to now where I’m constantly feeding my creative nature through writing, dance and art. I believe, by creating using my hands, I have grown as a person and allowed myself to be open to new ideas by sharpening my mind to details and open concepts. I believe that being creative is the next step to our succeeding in life and it’s through creativity, that many have made remarkable advances in science, technology and other skills.

Nurturing a young creative heart, ensures that as a child grows, their creative nature is more apt to push them to develop more openly, be more accepting of new ideas and allow them to push boundaries and impossibilities for greater achievements.

This book talks about all of this including how making things rests our minds, or allows us to recap a day in a neutral, more calming way. Almost like therapy, being creative, making things has a stimulation for our minds that other engagements do not.

I’ve always been creative. When I need to think through a problem, I do my art or when I’m emotionally heightened, either through an upset or anxiety, I find writing very calming as I pour all those frantic emotions into my creative juices. Heart patients will often take up a hobby, and by being creative find a non-medical treatment for high blood pressure and stress.

The author even provide craft ideas for you to indulge in. Never accept thinking that you are creatively challenged. There is no such thing!

This is a fantastic book!

I gave it: