The Lost Pleasure of Making Something With Your Hands

Making is different from consuming

Most of us spend a surprising amount of our lives looking at screens. We work on them, communicate through them, shop through them and increasingly use them for much of our entertainment.

There is nothing particularly wrong with that, but I sometimes think we’ve forgotten how satisfying it can be to make something physical.

There is a particular pleasure in starting with a piece of material and gradually turning it into something useful.

With leatherwork, the progress is tangible. You can see the shape developing on the bench, feel the material changing as you work with it and, when something goes wrong, you generally know about it straight away.

There is no hiding a badly placed stitch or an over-enthusiastic cut. You have to deal with it, learn from it and carry on.

That honesty is part of the appeal.

The pace of working by hand

Leatherwork doesn’t particularly like being rushed.

The leather needs preparing, measurements need checking, holes need marking and stitching takes time. There is a rhythm to the process, and once you settle into it, the work can become surprisingly absorbing.

This is something I see regularly in the workshop.

People arrive with different levels of experience and different expectations, but many become completely absorbed once they start working. The concentration comes quite naturally because there is something physical in front of them that needs their attention.

You aren’t thinking about the next email or the next notification.

For a while, there is simply the piece of leather in front of you.

Creativity doesn’t have to mean artisitic

I often hear people say that they aren’t creative.

I think that is partly because creativity has become associated with being able to draw, paint or produce something visually impressive. Making doesn’t have to work that way.

You don’t need to produce a masterpiece. You simply need to make decisions and see what happens when you put those decisions into practice.

A piece of leather becomes a wallet, notebook holder or bag because someone has imagined what it could become and then worked through the process of making it.

That process involves problem-solving as much as creativity.

You measure. You adjust. You make a mistake. You work out how to correct it. Gradually, something begins to emerge.

The satisfaction of finishing

There is something particularly satisfying about finishing the day holding something tangible that wasn’t there when you started.

Not another email or another photograph on a screen, but something real that you can pick up and say, “I made that.”

Perhaps that is why making continues to appeal to people even in an increasingly digital world.

It reconnects us with materials, tools and processes. It reminds us that we are capable of producing something with our own hands.

And perhaps we need that reminder more than we realise.

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