Creating not Consuming: Handicrafts Pt. 1

My house has been torn apart due to self-inflicted renovations. We are at the stage of the renovation process where I am wondering why we started this in the first place. It is astounding to me how easy and fast it is to demolish something and how long it takes to rebuild. We have been in this state for almost a year. But, we are nearing the end and final finishes are happening in the next few weeks. I’ll have carpet! And tile! Trim that is painted! Bathroom vanities!

Through this renovation, we replaced our weird not-to-code-in-any-way staircase with a new, normal, staircase. My husband (and anyone over about 5’8”) no longer has to duck to navigate the stairs. During this messy phase of construction, we were thankful to have moved into a vacant but furnished home just around the corner from our house. It belongs to a 97-year old woman who now lives with her daughter. What incredible serendipity! Staying at this house I was surrounded by many beautiful handmade things that Mrs. C made over her lifetime.

It was weirdly painful and sad to see my house – my nest – ripped up. Now, at the tail of renovations, I can see that the end result will be worth it. Our time at the temporary house was quite comfortable and I felt exactly like I was staying at my grandma’s, and yet, I felt a little bit lost. I felt an intense desire to nest and care for my home.

I spent a lot of my time those few months immersed in handicrafts – working on a quilt for my couch in my new and improved living room. I worked on a cross-stitch Christmas decoration I started many years ago. I made my world a little bit more “me” and it helped with my mental health in my gratefully displaced state.

Why bother teaching these skills to kids?

We have two months left in a truly chaotic and upheaved homeschool year. We have been displaced more than once. We have been living out of suitcases and boxes for months. I can’t find clean underwear some days, never mind the soap carving kit.

I have been reflecting on why we teach handicrafts in a Charlotte Mason education. My son absolutely hates learning crafts, and my daughter loves it. I could spend all day every day doing crafts with one kid, and have to bribe the other one. Sometimes I wonder – what’s the point?

Why do I push my son to learn how to craft things with his hands?

Why do I steer my daughter in the direction of specific crafts over others?

Why is it important to learn how to knit in 2025? When fast, factory fashion is a click away? 

Is the point of handicrafts to teach skills that will someday be useful in a profession or in taking care of yourself as an adult? Certainly it was true that sewing was such a skill 100 years ago in Charlotte Mason’s day. But now? What about in the unknown future with AI on the horizon?

Do we do handicrafts as a fun way to improve fine motor skills? 

Does lego count as a handicraft? What about typing and coding? If gardening is included under the umbrella of handicrafts, then what about making a spreadsheet?

As AI replaces many white collar jobs of the future, we don’t really know which skills will be in demand. This has always been true with every generation – we have always wondered whether we are preparing children for a future we can predict. This is why Charlotte Mason advocated for a broad education – learning a little about a lot of different things so children could try their hand at all. You don’t know what you don’t know. If you never have exposure to sewing, you might never know how much you love it and how naturally good at it you are.

My cousin Julia was given the opportunity in high school to take an all-girls skilled trades class. It opened up a whole new area of learning for her. She won the gold medal at Skills Canada’s National Competitions. Now she’s an electrician. She’s even in a commercial about it!

Learning Handicrafts

When Charlotte Mason was writing and teaching in the early 1900s, she emphasized the importance of teaching handicrafts as a way to support and build capability and confidence in children as they grew to adulthood. These handicrafts included not only domestic economy activities like mending and knitting, but also life skills like cooking, cleaning, mending, laundering, and gardening. As many adults in Charlotte’s day made livings for themselves from these skills, it was also a way to teach kids marketable skills. 

Charlotte Mason emphasized five things in her inclusion of handicrafts:

1. The end result should be something useful. Charlotte Mason didn’t think children should waste time on making chickens out of toilet paper tubes. She wrote that children should not “be employed in making futilities such as pea and stick work, paper mats, and the like.” This sets handicrafts apart from art – as art can have no purpose other than beautifying a space. I think that it’s not that children shouldn’t make egg-carton caterpillars at all, just that they should make these in art-class, not in the time set aside for handicrafts.
2. Charlotte Mason believed children should be taught slowly and deliberately how to craft these useful objects. 
3. Instruction should emphasize the habits of care, attention and precision, and discourage rushed slipshod work.
4. Handicraft choices should be intentional and at the appropriate level for the child to challenge but not frustrate.
5. The finished project can bring joy to others. Charlotte Mason encouraged children to use their handicraft time in acts of service to others.

In the early years of school (grades K-3), Charlotte Mason scheduled handicrafts 4 times per week for about 20 minutes. Each day was a different type of craft:

Monday	Sloyd	Charlotte Mason taught children to make useful things out of paper by following precise written instructions for measuring, cutting, and folding in a craft called Sloyd. Sloyd instruction progressed from paper to cardboard to wood and fabric.
Tuesday	Needlework	This would include crafts that use needle and thread such as: hand-sewing, mending, embroidery, cross-stitch
Wednesday	Other textiles/materials	Knitting, crochet, weaving, whittling etc.
Thursday	Health/Home	Nutrition, caring for our bodies, first aid, housework, gardening, cooking, outdoor survival etc.

All four of these streams of handicrafts emphasized a spirit of generosity and to make things that are of service and of value to others. 

In addition to a spirit of generosity, learning handicrafts reinforces the virtues of determination, patience (delayed gratification), peacefulness, prayerfulness, excellence (precision), orderliness (planning), obedience (following instructions), moderation (economically using materials), purposefulness, responsibility, self-discipline, and creativity. 

That’s a pretty formidable list of qualities cultivated by handicraft instruction, but the reasons for teaching handicrafts doesn’t stop there. 

In the last few months, I have been deep-diving into reading about the history of craft, the why of craft, the how of craft. Honestly, I have learned so much and have so much to share with you that in order to respect your time and not have you read a single blog post that takes 40 minutes to read, I’m going to split it into a series of upcoming blog posts.

First, I’m going to talk about the teaching handicrafts because they are skills for human survival and they connect us with our human ancestry. I’m going to talk about the upcoming tsunami of change that AI will bring and the importance of keeping at least one foot in our tangible embodied world.

Next, I’m going to talk about the role of crafts in building community, defeating loneliness, and helping with our mental health.

Then, I’m going to talk about nurturing our creativity, the importance of making art for beauty’s sake and the role of handicrafts in mindful and prayerful practice.

And lastly, I’m going to talk about the historical power of craft in disrupting and innovating and the importance of continuing to teach these craft skills for human ingenuity. 

So please come back so we can keep exploring this enormous topic. You can subscribe to my blog below and get an email to your inbox whenever I publish something new, so you don’t have to remember to check back. 

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Crafternoons

Inspired by all that I read, I decided to start up a mother-daughter craft club that meets once a month to work on a new kind of handicraft and baking skill. I invited my 5 year-old daughter’s little friends in our neighbourhood and their mothers. So far we’ve had three gatherings in my home among the boxes and unfinished home renovations. But more on Crafternoons next week….

Warmly,

-Heather

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