What our lives lack is what our hands fashion
“What our lives lack is what our hands fashion” is, I think, a quotation from a Neil Curry poem, though I can’t now find the poem itself. Wherever it’s from, it seems to me an important truth and I’m not the first to have thought so, as a recent trip to Ditchling in East Sussex reminded me.
I started my visit at the Ditchling Museum of Art & Craft which commemorates a remarkable community of artists and craftsmen who lived and worked here for much of the 20th century.
As you can see, it’s a beautiful place which attracted many people, including the artist and poet David Jones (about whom I have written here). The community’s philosophy was summed up in this fascinating document from the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic:
There is a lot that could be said about this document but I think “What our lives lack is what our hands fashion” pretty much sums it up. Inside the museum, I particularly enjoyed seeing this wonderful old printing press as well as some of David Jones’s work.
On the way out, I noticed a local jeweller’s called Pruden & Smith. The name was familiar so I popped in to discover that the shop had indeed been set up by the grandson of the goldsmith and silversmith, Dunstan Pruden. The Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic may be no more but its philosophy has not completely disappeared as these pictures show.
If you want to know more about the community at Ditchling, I can recommend this booklet by Ewan Clayton. But what about now? What can we do as families in the 21st century?
If we keep our eyes open, we’ll find that there are still plenty of opportunities to fashion beautiful objects. I am not an artist but over the last 21 months I’ve been working on an icon under the tuition of the wonderful Hanna Ward and this week I finally finished it. It was blessed yesterday on Gaudete Sunday.
I’ve also been enjoying learning the basics of bookbinding. Here are three of my books, two of which are covered with Japanese Chiyogami paper from Shepherds and the other of which is covered with a page from an old Ordnance Survey map. Painting an icon is difficult but bookbinding is relatively straightforward and highly fulfilling. The two approaches I used here were Japanese stab binding and Coptic binding. There are lots of tutorials available online and in a range of bookbinding books.
But there’s no need to go this far if you want a simple creative project for anyone in the family, and this brings me back to my last post on C.S. Lewis’s creative approach to reading which he outlined in one of his letters:
I begin by making a map on one of the end leafs: then I put in a genealogical tree or two. Then I put a running headline at the top of each page: finally I index at the end all the passages I have for any reason underlined. I often wonder – considering how people enjoy themselves developing photos or making scrap-books – why so few people make a hobby of their reading in this way. Many an otherwise dull book which I had to read have I enjoyed in this way, with a fine-nibbed pen in my hand: one is making something all the time and a book so read acquires the charm of a toy without losing that of a book.
Taking the spirit of Lewis’s suggestion, I created a small concertina book by cutting a piece of A4 card in half, folding it into four and then gluing the two end pieces together.
There’s now room for maps, genealogical trees, actual trees (as I explore the botany of Narnia), quotations, questions, or any other thoughts that strike me from the book. Crucially, there’s not too much space and the book is simple and quick to make, which means I don’t need to worry about creating a perfect object. I can also fill in the gaps in any order - I don’t have to start at the beginning and finish at the end. And, of course, this same approach can be followed by children and adults alike. Please let me know if you try it yourself!