Handmade goodness

I’ve been all bummed out that a few blogs I read haven’t been updating much, and then I realized the irony of this since it’s been so long since I blogged. What is it about summer? Since I last wrote,we’ve been to Hawaii and back, had visitors, and survived the highest recorded temperature ever for Seattle. It hit 103 or 106 or something downtown. The whole no AC situation got rather comical at that point.  It was so hot inside the house that my shea butter scrubby bar melted into a puddle on the floor of the shower. It survived many a steamy shower but not room temperature. Then about two weeks later the highs were 40 degrees lower. V weird. We’re back up to warm again, though thank goodness not quite like it was. Anyway, I’ll try to catch up on stuff. Maybe.

I’ve been thinking a lot about handmade things. The explanation I happened to read from Sugar City Journal sums it up really well for me:

“The women’s organization at church – the Relief Society – was hand-knitting bandages for lepers. Wanting to learn how to knit, I signed up for the project. And what a project it was! The bandages were knitted on teensy needles with the finest crochet thread. It took hours to knit only a few tedious inches. Perplexed, I questioned the ring-leader of the bandage-knitting crew on why we were knitting these instead of buying some gauze at the pharmacy. “Because,” she told me, “the lepers believe that a handmade bandage has the karma of the maker in it. That energy can help heal their wounds.”  “

That idea has clicked for me as well, and it helped me to put into words why I enjoy things that are handmade. Things I’ve made for us don’t always look perfect, but, for example, I enjoy having napkins and placemats on the table that I made. Imperfections are the mark of something being created by a person, not a machine, and I like it that way (and remind myself of that when I stress out about my own errors).

A recent perfect example of this are these hair flowers we bought in Hawaii. Tawnya had bought some and I thought they were really pretty, much nicer and more realistic looking than a lot of the plastic ones you see in every tourist shop. So later we went back so I could buy some, and both the husband and wife were manning the little stand. The petals are made out of clay, and she showed us how the back of the petals have imprints of the lines of her hands and the tops have her thumbprints. If you look closely in the above picture, you can see them there. Now THAT is handmade. I loved it when she showed us that. We talked a bit and after buying the flowers, they gave me a fresh lei, too. These are memories and touches that you simply can’t have had we bought something that was factory made.

In a broader sense, this is really about all the things we choose to have around us. Because it’s much easier to upload a few select pictures than sort through everything from Hawaii, the next few blog posts I’m working on will all be about things that have recently given me that good karma feeling. Be excited!