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EP. REVIEW: Do It Yourself!!

I think one of the most important values/appeals of DIY, whether you're doing it yourself or watching somebody else, is that it teaches you how to read the story imbued in all manmade objects. Time and labor may be invisible, but once your eye is trained and familiar with those processes, you can see the traces of it. You can tease out the hands of the person who made them in the past, however distant. It makes the world richer.

"Artisanal cuteness"
"Artisanal cuteness"
"Artisanal cuteness"

For Serufu, Takumin gently suggests her talents might be better applied away from jewelry and towards design and planning. And she's right! Seriously, pause the video and take in that entire illustration. Serufu shouldn't be left unattended around any drill bits, but the girl's got an imagination the size of Jupiter, and she can draw. Naturally, her concepts need some fine-tuning before they can begin to be considered feasible by a gang of teenagers, but that's what the planning process is all about. It's a basic tenet of brainstorming. You want a wide and wild array of ideas, because you never know when or where that eureka moment will strike. Serufu did exactly what she was supposed to do, and I'd kill to have her capacity for creativity. She's thinking about the treehouse of the future.

Working with our hands provides a tactile conduit through which we tangibly transform a thing into a craft. We put work into something, and that work becomes value, and that value becomes a piece of connective tissue to ourselves and everyone else that craft touches.