We have a complex, love-hate relationship with tools.

Within the context of household chores, home repairs and DIY projects that will not be completed in a thousand years, tools are instruments of torture. We pick them up grudgingly, use them carelessly (hence the broken nails and bludgeoned fingers) and throw them down in frustration.

And yet, when we use tools to create something, in our own time and without being forced to do so by our better half, then they become a source of such pleasure and the axe that breaks down the door of routine. Picking up a tool to carve, build, join, paint and craft feels comfortable, calming even. The tools become an extension of the self. And the garage or shed, which we usually visit grudgingly when we’re unloading the shopping or cleaning out some room on a Saturday morning, becomes an oasis of calm, seclusion and creativity.

Let’s take a page out of our prehistoric past. We frequently picture our ancestors as stuck in cold caves and huts, eking out a miserable living out of mud while going around a Pac-Man forest maze trying to avoid encounters with large-toothed animals. That may, on some level, be true. And yet, how would you explain cave paintings, jewellery made of bone fragments and precious metals, and the use of paints and dyes?

For thousands of years, crafts have been not only a pleasurable pastime but also a material metaphor, a way of creating meaning in form

True, a spear would come in handy when hunting. Yet why decorate it? That’s because arts and crafts are an essentially human behaviour. For thousands of years, crafts have been not only a pleasurable pastime but also a material metaphor, a way of creating meaning in form, a means to connect with ourselves and with the rest of society, and a basic source of entertainment.

Nowadays, most forms of entertainment are of the passive, virtual kind: we sit on the sofa to watch television, hunch over our laptop screen to get our You Tube fix, and pinch and swipe our tablet’s screen to download yet another app. Crafts, on the other hand, are a form of active entertainment that lead to a tangible result: a painting, a piece of jewellery, a sculpture. Moreover, crafts allow us to be creative. They leave room for interpretation and creative licence. They allow us to build and create.

Yet crafts are not just entertaining. They can also be educational. We frequently downgrade arts and crafts in favour of more academic pursuits. Reading, for instance, is considered to be more educational than playing around with a piece of wet clay. However, crafts can aid learning in areas such as science, maths, language, even nutrition and health.

Through crafts, you can also learn new skills. Children, also, will more readily learn concepts such as colours and numbers when they are painting and gluing things together. In the process, crafts allow children to develop their fine motor skills, explore ideas, build their self-esteem and express themselves while getting a good dose of entertainment.

Doing things with your hands is also healthy. In 2010, the American Journal of Public Health published a study entitled The Connection Between Art, Healing, and Public Health by Heather Stuckey and Jeremy Nobel. In this study, the researchers analysed various studies about the impact of art on our health and concluded that visual art activities helped distract thoughts of illness, improved well-being and medical outcomes, reduced stress, anxiety and negative emotions, and led to improvements in positive identity and social networks.

The moral of this story is that crafts – whether it’s sculpting, drawing, writing, painting, carpentry and anything in between – is good for you. Build, craft, make and share. Take a picture, open a blank document and start to write, find the figures hiding in a piece of clay. Create your own source of entertainment.

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