The Joy of Slow Making: Rediscovering Patience in a Fast World
Slow making is a push back against a culture of fast pace and instant gratification. Homemade craft and DIY is a process that deserves time. It may take a month of spare time to get a wooden shelf planed, sanded, and finished. It may take a year to sew a quilt. This isn’t a bad thing. It is part of the process. There is value to be found in the time taken to complete something, and it will make the end result so much more appreciated.
But when you make something slowly, your body and brain begin to adjust to a new tempo. Your fingers start to understand that you are not aiming for speed but that you want to feel the grain of the wood resisting your chisel or the thread catching slightly differently in the morning than it did in the evening. This sort of mindful labour brings a unique kind of attention that is hard to achieve these days. Your mind will stop wandering and you will focus on the sound of the chisel scraping against the wood or the thread passing through the fabric. After a year of labour, you will have learned to enjoy your patience. It is no longer something to suffer through but something to relish: a calming and clarifying state of mind that can be maintained even in a society that insists we have to produce more in less time.
Things made in this slow way don’t demand that you notice them. They don’t clamor for your attention. A bowl turned by hand sits on a table, a little wobbly; a wall hanging woven in the span of a year hangs in the same place. There is nothing to do but relax into the knowledge that it is all going to be okay. It’s calming because it was never rushed. People who come into our home comment on the peacefulness, without being able to tell why.
And in the process, it makes the maker more attached to the home, too. Because each piece is a marker of time passed, of phases of life. The blanket you knitted over a long winter, the lamp you turned while you were on tenterhooks, the shelf you built once you’d settled in a new house. Each one carries a narrative. Not a narrative that screams for attention, just one that seeps from the grain, the stitches, the wax. And surrounding yourself with them helps you to appreciate and hold onto the present, and reminds you that good things take time, like friendships, like experience, like a sense of home.
Because in the end, slow making is a way of regaining control of our time and the objects we choose to share our lives with. It is a relearning of the simple fact that there is no shortcut to making something beautiful, to something worth holding onto. The home, as a collection of slow-made objects, is no longer just where we reside, it’s a reflection of our capacity to attend and notice, to be brave enough to slow down in a culture that values speed. And that in itself, is the greatest expression of our creative liberty.
