Eco audit: making things

Back in the mists of time, it is said that people made things.  Their own clothes.  Their own shoes, even.  They grew and they hammered and they painted and they basically made their way in the world, themselves.

Today, we tend to forget that.  We recognise that things have to be made – but we seem to think that there is a race of super robots in China that actually make all the things that we can no longer make, but still need. Or something like that.

Where does making things begin? With example, I suspect.  With realising that it can be done, by seeing others do it.  By hearing stories, even, of people making things – and finding out that you don’t have to buy them in a shop.

My mother in law is a case in point.  She makes things – pottery, mainly.  She grows things. She grew up with a father who made many of her clothes (a tailor by trade) and a mother who knitted most of the rest.  Her father also made her bedroom furniture.

So to make things is normal. And I think I knew some of this in my teens.  But we have increasingly forgotten that we can make things – because a) we enjoy being able to buy things and b) because we are all too busy to make things.  We think.

In fact, I suspect that when we do make things, we derive pleasure several times over – from the making, from the using, from the sustaining ourselves, and even (if that thing we make lasts) from the multiplied memory of all of this every time we use it.

That thing we have – it entered our lives in a particular way.  It was purposed.  It was laboured over, perhaps.  It is prized – certainly. It is enjoyed – without question.

Some of the making in my own family happened more before I have clear memories of it happening – but I know it did.  My father did wood working – he made my dollshouse, my brother’s boat for the bath, the wooden sledge for heavy snow (thank you, Blue Peter, for the template), and my garage.

The garage I remember, because I helped to make it. I got to paint the roof, in thick black paint.  When it was finished, my father hung a string of tiny paper flags in the window of the garage. The roof comes off to take cars in and out.  (I don’t entirely remember  why I had a garage – I wasn’t into cars in the same way Dan was – but I love the garage in its own right.)

My mother made clothes for herself, and for me. She made curtains – in fact, all of our curtains at home are made by her. She knitted – and has picked up knitting needles on behalf of the youngest, in recent years.  And now both of them return to growing things – taking up an allotment again, growing more of their veg, as they did in the past.

Interestingly, a balance is shifting in today’s society.  There seems to be more and more handmade stuff.  Crafters’ markets, the popularity of Etsy selling handmade items, people’s blogs detailing what they make and salvage – they are on the increase.

There is an eco aspect to this: because we are also more likely to hold onto something if it is clearly ‘made’. And we are prepared to spend our own time making – which fits quite well in that category of making your own entertainment.

Sometimes, we come across items that strongly remind us that they needed human intervention. We have in our house a sheepskin rug which a relative made herself, many moons back.

She no doubt kept and fed the sheep in the first place.  She learned how to cure the skin later.  And now we have a rug, passed on to us more recently, which is clearly a made item. Still warming toes. Still going strong.

There is a balance.  We need to know where our skills are at, to begin with. I’m not setting out on the path of the sheepskin rug, but I can think about what I know I can do – and perhaps what I can reach towards, over time.

Part of my autumnal blog reading included lots of craft sites, lots of how tos.  I didn’t set out to read those – I found them along the way.  And they reminded me of the pleasure of making, of using your hands, the materials you have to hand.

This year, I asked for money for my birthday to make things.  I’m starting with some cross stitch, to make a needle book.  I may go on to sew some things.  There has been a request for a quiver, to house a collection of wooden ‘arrows’.

I’d quite like to make that myself. And now, thinking about it, there is the further pleasure even before the making.  That of contemplating making, considering how to do it, how to bring a project like that together.

No instructions. (No manual, either.) Equally, no timescale by which it has to be done – only a desire to make something. Something that will last.  Something that will do the job.

Something that makes me smile, even before it exists, as I type these words.