Craftfulness

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.