The path few months have been busy both at work and at home. My wife and I are considering a VERY big change within the next 6 months (more on that in January) and the project I am working with is totally re-vamping itself between now and June 2010, needless to say my mind and hands have been very active and will continue to be so as the next few months crawl by. This time though has prompted a reflection on the questions I am carrying with me through life and whether or not I am asking them in the best possible way. Over the past two years or so I have been formulating a question about craft and traditional skills as a tool for social change, as a catalyst for addressing the various levels of isolation we face in the world. By traditional skills and craft I am talking about things like farming, woodwork, textiles etc... Although we rely on these skills for our, most communities forgotten these skills (by shipping them overseas and industrialising them). As a result, most communities we find in the cities, towns and villages across Britian and the U.S. have slowly become isolated from themselves as well as the natural environment they are apart of. On top of that, any one of the three most widely recognised global dilemmas (climate change, peak oil and water shortages) will force a re-localisation of sorts, something we no longer have the resilience to sustain ourselves through.
On a positive note though, I have been seeing glimpses of the change that can come when communities are becoming re-skilled and not just at middle class 'hobby' levels, at all levels across social divides. People are starting to see themselves reflected in the things created or grown by their hands and seeing how people praise their work and use it. We're starting to see ourselves as important parts of the communities we inhabit.
Over the next 6 months I'm going to try and make periodic entries highlighting some of the gems going on around the re-skilling movement. As a start I'm going to post something I tried my hand at today, upholstery. I had two chairs with very badly ripped fabric on the seats. For one I used an old tweed coat I picked up at a charity shop (if you look closely you can see where the pocket used to be) for the other I used some scrap fabric left over from a quilting guild....
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