Why Make Things by Hand Any More?

 The Warehouse is a depressing place. I always leave it feeling poorer, if not in pocket, then in spirit. Wall to wall with bargains, I inevitably stumble upon shelves of decorative ornaments, designed to look handmade. Most likely they are, by teams of workers in a factory in China. My first reaction is sometimes positive, “oh that’s cute,” but when confronted by the price (very low) and the quantity (very high), I am reminded of something my Auntie once said to me. Upon receiving my gift, she said, “Imagine that, a whole factory somewhere, just to make these things.” At the time the comment stung, as I had put a lot of time and thought into finding just the right plastic trinket for her. She likes Manx cats. Here’s a Manx cat handpicked for her, the colours even matching those of her stumpy tailed feline. That was pre-Warehouse. Now I understand what she meant.

Why make something by hand, when you can buy whatever you need, and plenty you don’t, for very little money? It costs less to buy a jersey, ready-made and ready to try on, than it does to buy the wool to knit your own. Don’t we live in New Zealand? Don’t we have a few sheep running around? Visitors to this country are likely surprised to discover that we don’t simply reach out to a passing ewe and clip some merino from her back – "great, just the thing to top off that crochet project”. Unfortunately, quality wool is expensive and better left to those who know what they’re doing or those obsessed few who work only to keep themselves in yarn. My own efforts at creating a jersey using pure New Zealand wool leaves me out of pocket and cold, unless willing to endure the ridicule from loved ones, which wearing my creation would certainly attract. My knitting skills aside, it still hurts when seeing products that for me to make would cost more in materials alone, before applying hours of effort.

Visiting The Warehouse leaves me with another feeling – redundancy. What’s the point? Why put in the hours of effort needed to craft something by hand, when you can just buy one? In an age of mass manufacture and cheap imports, creating something by hand is unnecessary, and worse, quaint. A branded Disney toy is cool. A handmade by Grandpa toy is not. As much as their parents might try to persuade them otherwise, Grandpa’s toy won’t rate with the kids. It will never carry any amount of playground currency.  It’s not ‘real’.

“What do you mean by real, Monica?” Words of my Auntie resonate once again. This time, I had made the terrible mistake of complimenting her meringue by saying that it tasted ‘like a real one’. These days, we might say that a piece of home baking ‘tastes like a bought one’ to avoid such an error, but to do so reinforces the misplaced respect we have for products in a packet, as if manufactured goods are the benchmark in quality, when in most instances they most certainly are not. I think that the current cupcake craze and popularity of home baking and cooking shows are signs that handcrafted food, at least, is once again something to be valued, even if, for many of us, watching the shows and leafing through glossy books is the closest we come to leading a home baked lifestyle. ‘Home baking’ is being packaged and sold to us in the form of television series, books and ‘convenient’ forms of ingredients. It can be a shock to discover that a friend who ‘loves to bake’ is lovingly pouring ready-mix into a cake tin and serving up the result, happy in the fact that home baking is superior to bought. We have lost our taste in more ways than one.

A sure fire way to feel worthless in your handmade efforts is to spend a few hours making painstakingly by hand a gift for a child. Not only is Grandpa’s toy not ‘real’, it comes with a measure of obligation. The well-trained child will make the right grateful sounds, while a parent stands over them making encouraging remarks, “Look, Darren, a wooden dog! How special!” A younger or less threatened child will stomp right over the dog to get to the Mini-Mechanic TM Power Tool with flashing lights and whirr whirr sound effects. Who can blame them? Marketing companies spend megabucks researching the best way to get the attention of a 6 year old. Unless Grandpa is an electrical engineer / moulded plastic / packaging specialist, he will find it hard to compete for that attention at gift giving time, using only his handi-skills. He can only hope that Woody will be retrieved from the discarded wrapping paper and put aside for a time much later, when he might trigger some fond memories of the man who made a little dog for a little ungrateful boy.

Maybe it was a less marketing-intensive time or maybe I was just a weird little kid, but I relished the gifts made for me by family members. Sheepskin snuggly critters from Grandma, a wooden rocking horse from Granddad, a possum fur mouse from an Auntie. That mouse was nothing less than magic. For me it was real. It definitely received more affection than merits a stone with fur and felt appendages, riding to school pulled along on a roller skate. I couldn’t understand why nobody else seemed to share my enthusiasm. Even now, recalling the idea of that mouse and the many creatures I collected along the way, stirs up the awe I held for their like - the handmade, the unique. That’s why I believe we are still driven to make things with our hands, to “manufacture” in the original meaning of the word. It’s the pleasure of holding in your hand something that, many hours before, was only a vague idea. The surprise that comes from not knowing how something will turn out, the ‘happy accidents’, the ‘I wonder what will happen ifs’. It’s losing yourself in the repetition of brush strokes and stitches, the calm that comes from applying your hands to fibres, clay or wood. Ultimately, it’s a return to childhood, when we had permission to play, to come up with crazy ideas and not care what others thought, to have the audacity to look at a masterpiece – or a mouse - and believe that we too could make something special with our own two hands.

 Moni

P.S. I’m sure that these ideas have been better expressed by others. I haven’t looked. Otherwise, I might have written nothing, and simply linked, re-twittered or shared - too busy, lazy, scared, efficient or indifferent to put type to screen myself. Then I would have missed out on the selfish pleasure of creating, using only this computer and my bare hands, a piece of text of my own. Thanks for reading.

P.P.S. It has just been pointed out to me that a 'home baked lifestyle' might contain connotations I didn't intend.