Our Ideas in Progress format is a space to collect and share thoughts, visions and ideas from practitioners in the ecosystem. They invite us to dream collectively and learn to explore what it means to build in community.
We’re at the checkout of the BLICK Arts Materials store on San Francisco’s historic Market Street. My best friend buys calligraphy pens and a practice booklet. Another friend asks her partner to choose between red or green mounting paper, to frame their years of polaroids together. I browse beginner crochet sets.
We are millennial women on a Saturday with free will and plans to craft.
My favourite thing about the word “craft” is its expansiveness. In one context it can refer to the deeply unserious tchotchkes we make on a whim. In another, to have a craft is to have a lifelong, impassioned skillset that is honed with our hands/hearts/heads through uncountable focus hours. Photographers, teachers, surgeons, organisers — craftspeople have always known that the process is the product.
As both verb and noun, craft can be found in flow states, existing beyond the containers of capitalist productivity schemes and hollow, homogenising artificial intelligence.
“Your job can be taken away from you at any time,” journalist Jodi Kantor tells graduating college students entering this particularly dismal labor market. “Your craft, however, belongs to you forever.”
Crafts are resilient. Embodied in nature, and often relational in their exchange, craftsmanship requires the art and science of sustained care, taste, precision, context, curiosity, contribution, intentionality, authenticity… and I feel like I’m just scratching the surface. They show us that perfection is a myth, but practice is our birthright.
For me, writing is the craft that reminds me of my agency and capacity to bring new things into being. I tinker and tend, rearrange and revise until my constellation of letters grows closer to capturing what I mean and feel.
Crafts aren’t without struggle (far from it), but they have the power to ground us in places of familiar refuge, while simultaneously propelling us to create new futures.
So what’s your craft? Not your role, not your hobby, but the thing that puts you in a deep connection with yourself and the world around you?
