Making of Things by Hand

Many years ago I had the happy opportunity to attend a week long workshop at the John C. Campbell Folk School (FolkSchool.org) in Brasstown, North Carolina. It was an inspiring immersion in surface design, camaraderie with fellow students from all over the country and the world, music, the mountains, and wonderful meals in the dining hall. I still receive wonderfully written letters from the Director, Jan Davidson. He is a craftsmen with words among other things, and this paragraph in a recent letter especially caught my attention.

"Allen Easton, the author of the 1938 classic Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands came to the school in 1941 and spoke to a gathering in the Community Room. The Cherokee Scout quoted him:

The making of things by hand was till recently a necessary and habitual practice of normal life. When handmade things became no longer a physical necessity, something vital went out of the normal development to which individual have for centuries been accustomed. Democracy's biggest job is to draw the creative personalities of all the people of the country, for in no other way can a democracy more thoroughly develop its greatest wealth and foremost need: a thinking people. President Eliot of Harvard told us: We have lately become convinced that accurate work with carpenters' tools, or lathe or hammer and anvil, or violin, or piano, or pencil or crayon or camel's hair brush, trains well the same nerves and ganglia with which we do what is ordinarily called thinking.

Jan goes on to say that all the crafts they teach at the Folk School help both the left and right brain work better and more in balance, so we can get smarter everyday and find and nurture the positive elements in ourselves and others. I know I feel discombobulated and disconnected when my hands and brain haven't been engaged in something creative for too long.

Let's all go make something and make ourselves and the world better. And if you feel inclined to visit the Folk School the photo above is the cover of their new catalogue of class offerings.