The revolution will be hand-spun

Craft as a degrowth practice

Photo by Cristian Tarzi on Unsplash

Nestled away in her quiet basement workshop in Prince Edward Island, Nell, an alpaca wool artisan, spins her wool by hand. Not because there isn’t yarn at the store, and not because she doesn’t know where to buy socks. But because the rhythm of the wheel tells a story, not of productivity, but of care and patience.

Craft was once dismissed as a quaint domestic pastime and is now quietly staging a revolution. Not one amplified with megaphones, but one crafted over time with knitting needles, chisels, looms, and slow, deliberate gestures. It is a form of resistance that doesn’t seek attention but strongly carries forward history, refusing erasure. Crafts persist to create a world that is not mass-produced, disposable, or profit-driven, but that is rooted in place, meaning, skill, and community.

Artisans have long pushed back against the logic of industrial capitalism. In the 19th century, the Arts and Crafts Movement emerged as a response to the alienation and disenchantment of mass production. Thinkers such as William Morris and John Ruskin believed that the beauty and joy of a product should not be sacrificed for efficiency and profit. Though the movement has been romanticised and limited by its class dynamics, it planted the seeds for a more human economy that valued the dignity of labour and the connection between maker, object, and environment. Today’s craft echoes that ethos but with a different kind of urgency among the backdrop of ecological breakdown, supply chain fragility, and a loneliness epidemic. Craft is not simply nostalgic and aesthetic, it is a degrowth practice. It offers a lived critique of a world and consumption habits driven by speed and scale. Craft models an alternative that is grounded in sufficiency, care, and embodied knowledge.

Against Speed and Disposability

We live in a culture that has been systematically trained to crave speed. From fast food to fast fashion and from next-day delivery to hustle culture at work. Many measure success by output, efficiency, and scale leaving a trail of waste, landfills of cheap goods, burnt out workers, and communities stripped of their adaptive and resilient capacities.

Craft interrupts that cycle and slows the tempo of life. When a person decides to repair instead of toss, or spends months hand-stitching a gift, they are opting out of the logic of fast and disposable. In a world where things are made to break, they are crafting items that insist on durability.

Slowing down isn’t only economic refusal, it is also a psychological reclamation. The process of crafts invites us into what psychologist Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi famously called flow: the mental state of full absorption where your actions and awareness merge and time loses its edge, often followed by a sense of deep satisfaction from the task. Flow states are not about productivity, but about meaningful engagement. When artisans craft, we enter into this rhythm that reconnects body and mind to the material.

Crafting as Relational

While the act of craft is often a solitary pursuit, it thrives within community. Across the world, shared studios, guilds, maker spaces, and repair cafes function as commons. These are not just sites of production, but also of relational infrastructure where people gather to make things, and to make meaning together.

These studios, found all over the world such as the Cape Breton Center for Craft and Design or Kwartzlab in Kitchener, Ontario, regularly host workshops that create intergenerational learning loops that pass skills along. Students become teachers, elders share techniques with newcomers, and newcomers bring new ideas. This kind of reciprocal pedagogy is what Silvia Frederici described as “reproductive commons”: spaces that cultivate knowledge, care, and social reproduction which is necessary for a flourishing life beyond capitalism.

Where mass produced goods are transactional and anonymous, craft reintroduces intimacy and generative relationships. Craft becomes the opposite of alienation - the maker sees their hand in the final form, and often, so does the recipient. These acts of shared making and consuming counter the logic of privatization and individualism. They help to support a sufficiency economy where success is not measured in units sold but in skills learned, needs met, and connections formed. This echoes Ivan Illich’s notion of conviviality: craft is the capacity for people to use tools and systems in ways that are cooperative and life-affirming.

In these spaces, degrowth is not a theoretical abstraction but rather a lived practice. It’s the mutual aid of tool-sharing, waste-reducing ethic of material reuse, and revaluing of slowness and attention. It is not based on austerity or backward-looking, but about sufficiency and community growth. There is no desire to scale up or become the next unicorn start-up. Craft works at the scale of neighbourhoods and kitchen tables. It privileges quality over quantity and story over speed. These are not values of a market economy, but of community.

Craft is a quiet disruption that holds old knowledge as it weaves new patterns. It reminds us that slowness is not stagnation. Craft is deliberation, and the beauty of it is luxury and a form of care.

Nell isn’t waiting for permission or a policy change. She is spinning wool by hand, building the new economy with her hands, thread by thread.