Craftfulness by Rosemary Davidson

Author:Rosemary Davidson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-12-11T16:00:00+00:00

‘Crafting for me is a tiny little action against mass consumption and mass production. If you feel like you can make your own things, you can realise your own creativity and power to make, rather than buy. It can also make you appreciate the work that does go into handcrafted things and feel more connected to objects around you.’

– Emma Smith, publisher, stained-glass designer

FIND YOUR INNER CHILD

You may believe you are not a creative person; maybe your previous attempts led nowhere and you became discouraged. Some level of effort is required to learn any new skill, and as we have seen in the digger rats’ experiment in Chapter Two, this can be hugely rewarding. While in the past, you may not have committed fully to learning the techniques required to reach a standard you are happy with, to be happier with your work, it is important to value the challenge of learning and improving. With craft activities, our heads and hands have to find a way of working together, which for many of us is easier said than done; patience more than skill is essential to achieve incremental progress. Sometimes, adopting the mindset of a child at play can unleash the courage to simply have a go. Picasso’s observation is key to understanding how our beliefs about our own abilities and talents should be challenged, ‘Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.’

As we saw in Chapter Four with Csikszentmihalyi’s flow study, as children, our creativity is encouraged and stimulated, but as we move up through education, there is less time for messy play, making ‘stuff’ and writing stories; we have fewer opportunities for expressing ourselves through arts and crafts. The freedom to indulge our imaginations is often curtailed by a parent’s academic expectations, the curriculum, pressures of exams, making a life plan or choosing a profession, but none of this should exclude the value of play.

Ken Robinson’s 2006 Ted Talk, ‘Do schools kill creativity?’ has been viewed online over 40 million times and seen by an estimated 350 million people in 160 countries, making it the most viewed Ted Talk of all time. His contention is that creativity is as important in education as literacy. As children, we aren’t scared to have a go at things, we take chances and don’t worry too much about being wrong. By the time we’re adults, however, we have lost that capacity and Robinson asks, how will we come up with anything original if we’re not prepared to be wrong? He says that schools are partly responsible for steering children away from subjects they enjoy which are unlikely to lead to a fruitful career; he believes that many brilliantly creative aspirations are stifled because they are undervalued in our education system. This is not to blame parents or teachers, but rather to look at the system which puts so much emphasis on academic achievement.

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