Redefining "Handy" and Learning How to Make Things
What Does It Mean To Have "Material Intelligence"?
At the end of every Sunday’s post, paid subscribers get a list of “things I read and loved” for the week, capped with the “Just Trust Me” — a piece that’s difficult to describe in a way that might compel you to automatically click, but that’s moving or fascinating or otherwise delightful.
Today’s interview is its own Just Trust Me — I tried to summarize it in the headline, of course, but there’s also so much in this interview that resists any sort of neat summary, and it’s rewarding and thought-provoking in so many ways. So read on as I talk to Erin Boyle, co-author of Making Things, and I can’t wait to hear your thoughts in the comments at the end.
You can buy Making Things here, subscribe to Erin Boyle’s newsletter here, and follow her on Instagram here. You can follow Rose Pearlman and her incredible punched rugs on Instagram here.
This is not the type of book I usually feature in a Culture Study interview, but it’s also DEEPLY Culture Study — as a reader of the newsletter yourself, I wonder if you could articulate how you think it intersects with some of the topics, ideologies, etc. we engage here?
Some of my favorite essays on Culture Study have been the conversations on career burnout and on hobbies—specifically those non-commodified, non-career-related pastimes that I think many Culture Study readers see as an antidote to the expectation that our free time should be spent either in advancing our careers or in shouldering all of the responsibilities for keeping our families and the larger economy afloat. The line you use to describe the interviewees for your Garden Study posts—”You don’t have to be an expert, just enthusiastic”—really sums up what Rose and I hoped to accomplish with this book.
What’s essentially a very large craft book might seem like an odd pairing with more journalistic or academic books, but I see Making Things as an invitation to a kind of wholesale reimagining of our relationships to objects and materials and our ability to make and manipulate them—and the meaning we can derive from that practice. (I hope our readers will also see our book through this lens.) More than being filled with one-off tutorials for a bunch of cool-looking crafts, we really wanted the book to engage with readers’ ideas about consumerism, capitalism, and sustainability—and the way that that’s tangled up with the kind of hands-on making that we’re celebrating (and teaching) through these projects.
Apologies if I’m stealing some of your answer for #1, but I loved this section: “Getting out of our brains and into our bodies — getting lost in the rhythmic meditation of knitting or weaving or tying wire into knots — allows us the time and space to think more critically, to make more creatively, and to consume more thoughtfully.”
This is a book about making things, but it’s also a book about what the mind’s able to do *while* you are making things. Can you talk a little more about that practice?
I find the act of doing something with my hands to be really closely related to the unscrambling of ideas in my head. When I’m feeling stressed or stuck creatively, putting my hands to work on a project is almost immediately helpful. The quiet, meditative hours or even minutes I spend making something gives me the time and space to calm my brain and generate new ideas.
I think I really understood how important this process was for me after becoming a parent. Parenthood, especially of my still-young children, massively impacted the time I had available to work and also to do…literally anything else that I wanted. Suddenly, the little projects that had always fueled my creativity and sparked new ideas felt indulgent or plainly impossible. When my kids were at school or otherwise being watched by someone who wasn’t me, I felt like I was supposed to have my butt in a chair, my computer open, and, most crucially, to have something very concrete (and income-producing) to show for it at the end of the day.
The truth is, though, quiet, meditative tasks are often the very things that help me to find the words I’m trying to grasp. So, more recently, I’ve embraced the meditative diversions that used to feel auxiliary to working. It might look like I’m fiddling around with some string or playing with cardboard, but actually I’m writing a newsletter.
Having a project in my lap and on my fingers focuses my mind just enough to make room for new ideas to sprout—it’s grounding for me in a generative way. A lot of the projects in Making Things—knitting and weaving and sculpting clay–are crafts that require two hands but only a part of the brain. In other words, they’re activities that keep much of our physical attention while not requiring complete mental attention. We can watch a movie or chat with a friend or figure out the solution to a tricky paragraph we’ve been working on while also manipulating materials with our hands. The project I can complete while also mentally problem-solving becomes a bonus—a finished project with its own set of benefits. Scrolling through my phone while half-watching a movie, for example, feels like it detracts from my mental health and well-being, but sitting in the front of a movie with a knitting project feels restorative and beneficial.
Culturally, a lot of us are caught up in this idea that every minute of our working lives needs to be accounted for and efficient. By extension, we may feel that we need to rely on inexpensive, outsourced labor to maintain this heightened level of productivity. (Hello, capitalism!) So when it comes to even considering making things ourselves—insert also planting our own gardens, growing our own food, cooking delicious food—we almost always ask why we would spend that time when we can get anything we want with a few clicks of buttons and a few dollars? We’re busy! Making things takes time we do not have—and look, everything we want, we could buy!
There’s some truth to this. We very often do not have the time to create what we need by ourselves. It’s reasonable to ask who on Earth is expected to return our emails or make our dinners while we wile away our time crafting. We’ve increased the distance between ourselves and the things we need or want—and also made for ourselves a steeper learning curve for meeting our own needs. But when we relinquish making things ourselves in favor of quick, store-bought alternatives, we can also become disconnected from our belongings. We can undervalue or forget entirely about the people and resources that create what we buy, and we can continue a pretty ravenous and unsustainable cycle of consumerism. More importantly, we miss out on the added benefits of personal creativity—the quiet, meditative hours spent working, the ability to make things according to our own taste, the sense of pride and accomplishment that comes with finishing a project.
There’s no doubt that knitting your own bath mat from a ripped-up sheet, using giant hardware-store dowels carved into knitting needles, is not an efficient activity. It takes a stupefying amount of time, it’s mildly physically grueling, it can get messy with all the fiber dust from the stripped sheets…but there’s no comparison between a bath mat you make yourself over the course of a few weeks and one that you buy at the dollar store or HomeGoods on the way home. You’re never going to look at that dollar-store bath mat—or luxury bath mat—and think, I DID THAT. You’re probably not going to feel proud or accomplished. You won’t learn a new skill or put to use an unloved item.
Once you make something yourself, the value of that object is immediately heightened. You may get a fleeting hit of dopamine when you buy a new mat, but you get that hit of dopamine every single time you put your feet on a whole-ass rug you made yourself. You’re not likely to toss out a bath mat you labored over yourself and there’s almost no way to quantify the value of the quiet, contemplative hours spent working with your hands. That’s an extreme example, but, laborious rug projects aside, the same is true even of much, much smaller projects.
Rose and I tried to keep Making Things tightly focused on really manageable projects. We really wanted to reach people with the idea that it’s not only not actually all that time consuming or hard to make a whole host of very useful things using what you likely already have around you, but that it’s rewarding, too. It’s a little bit laborious to trace an envelope template onto your kid’s artwork, cut it, and glue it back together to make an envelope, but when you compare the experience of making an envelope from an existing piece of a kid’s artwork with the steps required to make a trip to a store and pick out new ones that you like, it starts to feel like a time-saving practice, to say nothing of a more personal and meaningful one.
I cannot tell you just how much I loved the “supplies” section. I think because I get very weary of someone telling me how to do something and using phrases (for paper types, for tools, for yarn) that I don’t know and then I find buying or using slightly the wrong thing and getting demoralized — but this section says “when we say CRAFT KNIFE, THIS IS WHAT WE MEAN.”
In each section, you also lay out the fundamentals of a “technique,” like sewing, with extra-clear illustrations of the difference between a running stitch, a whipstitch, and a backstitch.
I find it tremendously useful for those of us who want to get into making, broadly conceived, but not have the passed down knowledge that others have, for whatever reason. It makes me want to think more about the idea of handiness, where it arrives from, how it is acquired, how we at once honor it yet make little space for acquiring it. Can you talk a little more about how you thought about basics and the entire idea of “teaching” handiness in this book?
Oh god, it makes me so happy that you’re asking these questions.
One of the main ideas we want people to gain from this book is the notion of abundance born of constraint. That might sound lofty, but it’s actually just down-to-earth. The truth is that we both live in small apartments, we’re both creatives with schoolteacher spouses living in an astronomically expensive city. Big budgets and ample storage space are just not a part of our reality—and they’re not the reality of lots of other folks—so it was important for us to make a book that reflected that truth.
Crucially, we didn’t want to make a book that was merely aspirational or pretty to look at. We wanted to make a book that people could open and immediately put to use. That meant we needed to figure out what pared-down list of materials and supplies would be most accessible and most versatile. We didn’t want to leave folks without something necessary for completing a project, but we also weren’t interested in including a whole bunch of projects that required specialized supplies. After spending a lot of time thinking about those specifics, we decided to get kind of granular in the book’s front matter. Some of this felt like it bordered on being pedantic, but we also felt that some hand-holding would give folks the confidence to get started.
Sometimes it’s just helpful to have specifics, I think. Chipboard, for instance, is a sturdy cardboard that’s particularly useful (much more so than corrugated cardboard) for some particular projects that we developed. So we wanted folks to know to look for it on the backs of sketch pads or watercolor-paper pads and such. Jersey is a knit fabric that works up beautifully in weaving projects, and most of us have it in abundance in the form of old t-shirts or bedsheets or baby slings, and we wanted to remind folks to use those found materials that are right at hand. The specifics matter here: they’re not supplies that anyone needs to spend lots of time or money on, but you do have to know what you’re looking for.
Major craft retailers are obviously not going to convince folks that they can make lots of things with limited supplies, but Rose and I will happily tell folks that it’s definitely in the best interests of humans and the planet at large. A big-box craft store can convince you that you need separate, specialized tools for every different project, but we want to challenge that idea. We want to invite people to see how many projects and techniques are interrelated. In our book, we show folks how we use a clothespin and a cardboard tape core to make a pom-pom and how we add a few more of those clothespins onto an old embroidery hoop to make a string bag and how we can put still more of those clothespins around the rim of a trash can to make a winter hat. We experimented with the limits of our own creativity and ingenuity, and we filled the book with as much of that accumulated knowledge as possible. We hope that folks can see those connections from the get-go and then, we hope, invent more innovations of their own.
In recent years, there’s been a shift from general-interest craft books to specialized, single-subject books. Illustrated how-to books like this one tend to hyperfocus on one technique and then share a small array of projects that put that technique to use. We set out to do something different. We wanted to show that a basic mastery of some pretty simple concepts like sewing, weaving, knitting, and so on could translate into an ability to make a whole host of things. We especially wanted to showcase how these skills and projects leave tons of room for experimentation and customization. Making Things is not the Lego-set style of craft book, where you’re expected to fit very specific pieces together in order to create a very specific project.
In writing this book, we wanted to harken back to the big paperback manuals published in the 1970s—ones that had inspired us. Among our favorites are Living on the Earth by Alicia Bay Laurel (1971) and the original Making Things: The Handbook of Creative Discovery by Ann Sayre Wiseman (1973). Both of these craft classics were hand-lettered (or typeset with a hand-lettered font) and illustrated with line drawings.
They’re wildly open and far-ranging with sometimes shockingly bare-bones instructions. Both of them imply that readers would have a baseline understanding or at least rudimentary knowledge of materials and how to make things themselves. Alicia Bay Laurel’s book in particular was a product of the Back to the Land movement of the 1970s, which grappled with some of the same concerns about consumerism and capitalism (and the counterpoints of self-reliance and skill-building) that we’re still contending with today on an even more pronounced scale. We wanted our book to be an ode to those free-wheeling books of the 1970s, but we felt like we couldn’t be quite as fast and loose with our instruction in 2024. We felt like we should do a bit more to help folks along, but we steered away from being overly prescriptive in our instructions at the same time.
As we’ve shifted so entirely from a making economy to a buying economy, we’ve lost a lot of inherited skills that we might have learned from doing or from observing rather than from formal instruction. Frankly, we hardly even get formal instruction anymore. When I was growing up, Ms. Robertson taught my class of unruly seventh graders how to properly sew a button and Mr. Beard taught us how to drill a hole, but I’m not sure that many basic life-skills Home Ec classes are still offered. Making Things isn’t a comprehensive home economics book by any stretch, but I think Rose and I both really benefited from having these kinds of elementary life skills. We wanted to share as many of them as possible, so Making Things demonstrates how skills like these can be put to use in really practical and useful projects.
We also wanted Making Things to be a safe space for people to learn how to do a very basic thing that’s truly useful—like cutting a t-shirt into yarn or folding a piece of paper into a box. We especially wanted to show how so many of the small instructions that we gave—how to tie a cow-hitch, for example—showed up again and again. It’s stupidly thrilling once you start to make the connections between projects and then begin to understand how learning to make one thing means you now know how to make ten others.
At the launch party for Making Things, my best friend’s mom learned how to finger cord with rope, for example. A few weeks later, she was getting ready to kayak when the strap for pulling her kayak to the water snapped. She didn’t have any thick rope with her to replace it, but she did have some cotton string. She was able to work up a quick cord based on our instructions, which allowed her to pull her kayak without snapping the too-thin string or wreaking havoc on her hand. THIS IS WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT. We don’t have a “Kayak Pull-Cord” project in the book, but we do show four different ways to make a cord—and we offer seven or eight different ways to put that cord to use! Absolutely one of those ways can be a cord that can pull a kayak.
This is what we mean when we talk about material intelligence in this book. This understanding of how materials and objects function is so valuable that I think it’s hard to overstate it. There’s one sidebar in the book about attaching two rubber bands together to make a tight four-way tie for a bundle of stationary or a small pile of boxes. We almost struck it because it felt so obvious, but I think we were right to worry that folks are increasingly left flailing out there, just walking around not knowing that they can knot two rubber bands together to make a nifty little cinch! We wanted to share as much of that knowledge as possible because when people are deeply familiar with how something works, that informs how they’re able to repair it, how they can build on it, how they can make it function for themselves in a different way, or solve a different problem with slight tweaks or adjustments. Understanding materials inherently makes us less reliant on the broader machinations of consumer culture—and more able to do things for ourselves.
I know some of this perspective can veer into bootstrap-y, rugged individualism territory, but I do think that the more we have the confidence and ability to make things from what we already have, the less we feed the capitalist system that doesn’t care about us or the people making our stuff or the planet that our rampant consumerism is actively making uninhabitable.
In the introduction to Making Things, I reference Glenn Adamson’s book, Fewer, Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Objects. He wrote some lines that I love:
It’s true that a farm family of the 1930s had to depend on their material intelligence for survival, while today’s city dwellers and office workers can get away with ignoring their physical environment and making a fine living. Maybe this feels like a sort of progress. But basic necessity is only one side of our relationship to materials. There are others too: pleasure, discovery, inventiveness, and particularly important, responsibility. Our relationship to materials determines much about the way we live on Earth.
So, yes, I absolutely agree that what we’re rooting for here is a general kind of handiness. Preposterously, we tend to deride folks for having the very wide but shallow skill sets that are so useful. The second half of the expression jack of all trades, after all, is master of none. What an extremely jerky thing to say! Would that we all knew all trades! Rose and I have so much respect and admiration for master artists and craftspeople—and Rose herself is an extremely skilled rug hooker—but with Making Things we wanted to liberate folks from this elite idea of mastery. We wanted to provide toe-dips into a big range of techniques, and we wanted to offer shortcuts and tricks that make finished products less laborious to achieve without compromising their usefulness or beauty.
As a way of talking more about the practice of gift-giving within the realm of making, can you tell the story of the gift you gave your cousin for her 100th birthday?
I think a lot about how we regularly encourage kids to rely on their own creativity, and we shower them with praise for making things themselves. Kids make cards for their parents’ and grandparents’ and teachers’ birthdays and holidays, and no one expects anything more. The general agreement is that few things are sweeter than a handmade card from a kid. But, as is true for so many creative pursuits, we stop encouraging this practice when we reach adulthood. We might even stop appreciating the results.
I hope that the projects in Making Things give folks confidence to reclaim some of the freedom and agency that we nurture in children. What’s the point of spending so much time teaching little kids to paint and do crafts if we’re going to totally quash those habits in adulthood? So, when I was thinking of a hundredth birthday gift for my cousin, I leaned into making something small, sweet, and largely ephemeral for an elderly loved one who was actively purging her apartment of extra belongings.
I made an accordion memento book, with a cover cut from one of my kid’s old jumpsuits, and my kids and I filled it with little drawings and love letters and pressed flowers. We made something small and heartfelt instead of offering an extravagant, resource-heavy gift. (As an aside, I feel pretty strongly that neither can we expect folks to hang onto our handmade card or woven potholder for an eternity, but that’s a whole different book.)
You co-wrote this book with Rose Pearlman, and your friendship and collaboration pulses throughout. What are the specific pleasures of making with someone else — and, conversely, what are the pleasures of making on one’s own?
Rose and I started working together and becoming friends in this together-apart kind of style. She’d develop a project, hand me a cute little bag full of the supplies over coffee at a café between our apartments, and I’d go home and make it based on her instructions. Lots of these were projects that Rose has been developing and making for the past twenty years. Having the opportunity to try my hand at them was such a fulfilling and emboldening process for me. And I think, in turn, my ability to write about the projects and explain why they were useful or important was really gratifying for her.
I’ve always been a pretty hands-on and handy person—definitely not afraid to do things myself or try something new—but I’d never really considered making a whole range of things myself. Sewing on a sewing machine, for instance, was something I had categorized wholesale as something I don’t do. I didn’t have a sewing machine, and, the few times I’d tried to use my mom’s machine, I’d broken more needles than made stitches. Rose wouldn’t call herself a sewer either, but she can sew. I think that’s a really important mindshift—and a gift she gave me that I hope we’ve managed to impart on readers.
We don’t need to define ourselves by the things we make, but we can still make them. This goes back to the idea of handiness, right? This isn’t a book about becoming an expert in any one thing. It’s about trying lots of things and becoming increasingly capable as a result. It’s about getting comfortable experimenting with something you’ve never done before! In lots of ways, I wanted Making Things to recreate for other people the same experience that I had through my friendship with Rose — to give them the same kind of starting blocks and confidence and encouragement that she gave to me.
I really truly believe that most people can make the projects in this book. They are not projects that require extensive background knowledge or skills. They’re not things that rely on a vast store of materials or equipment. Could someone refine these projects and add to them and elevate them to be exquisite and exacting? Absolutely. (If that’s your bag, please do.)
Are there folks out there who are legitimate experts on one of these crafts? Of course. (Thank goodness.) But we don’t all have to be experts or even very accomplished; we can just get started. We can give ourselves permission to make things without those things being perfect. And the fact is, once you get started, you don’t stop. The more you make things, the more you can make things and the more you want to make things.
It’s no surprise probably, but a record-breaking number of people in the past month have told me that they’re not crafty. They always say it in the same way, hands up, waving off the idea that they might be able to make something themselves. Not to be dramatic, but making things is kind of our birthright. We’re humans! We have opposable thumbs! We use tools! We can definitely make things!
One thing that I envisioned a lot in writing this book was the communal experience that folks might have, using this book together with other people. There’s so much richness that comes from making things in community with others—conversation and skill-sharing, for starters. And of course there’s a rich human history of this too—quilting bees and knitting circles all existed for a reason! I share a story in the book about sitting with Rose and making rolled-hem handkerchiefs and the simple act of working on something slow and meditative in the company of someone else. I really wish for that kind of experience for all of us.
Finally, as a little teaser question: Which project in the book gave you the most grief, and which one gave you the most joy?
There’s a project in here that sometimes I get a little flush of embarrassment that we put in, because it’s so simple, but it’s also really honest and so I can’t help but love it. Please see: The Woven Checkerboard.
One of my kids is a really big game person: board games, card games, kickball games — they love them all. The summer they were five, when I was first working on this book in earnest, we spent a week at my parents’ house, and they got really into playing checkers with my dad. When we got back to the city, they missed the checkerboard (and the one-on-one attention of playing the game with an adult), and so I made a cloth checkerboard. I took a square of cloth, cut some lines in it, and weaved strips of contrasting fabric through the strips that I cut. I modeled it entirely on the construction-paper weavings I remember making in grade school. It took me five minutes to make, and the finished “board” is totally raw. Truly, just completely unpolished without hems or seams. BUT IT WORKS. That’s the whole point. We can make things.
We don’t have to fire up a computer and place an order on Amazon. We also don’t have to spend hours and hours hand-quilting a prize-winning cloth game board. Sitting down to write instructions for something that was born totally intuitively was a challenge. Every time I tried to write the instructions, I felt like I was overcomplicating it. That was actually a recurring experience in writing this book. We didn’t want long, complicated-sounding instructions to get in the way of people trying a project, but we also didn’t want to leave anyone hanging. I think in the end, I think Making Things manages to strike a balance. ●
You can buy Making Things here, subscribe to Erin Boyle’s newsletter here, and follow her on Instagram here. You can follow Rose Pearlman and her incredible punched rugs on Instagram here.
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