Our mission is to provide self-care through social crafting and to rewire your brain one stitch at a time, so what does that mean?
Craftcare
Craftcare is an act of self-care the benefits that a lifelong craft practice brings to your everyday life. This form of self-care is rooted in neuroscience and our own customer’s experiences in the therapeutic benefits of our workshops.
Our Resources
This is Your Brain on Crafts
The neuro connection between crafting and skill-building. Learning and practicing new crafts correctly can aid you in all areas of your life by increasing the neuro pathways in your brain. This helps you pick up other skills faster and can combat the degenerative effects of aging!
How to Meditate if You Don’t Like Meditating
Our favorite craft activities to help you enter a meditative state based on art therapy research.
How Crafting Can Improve Your Mental Health
An introduction to the positive effects that crafting can have on your mental health with recommendations on how to incorporate these into your daily routine. For example repetitive motions, such as crochet and embroidery invoke a meditative state that helps to pull us away from our outside stress and worries and provides something physical to focus on. When you start to feel overwhelmed with stress or anxiety, try picking up a simple craft project. Knitting, embroidery, crochet, or even something as basic as coloring in a sketchbook will force you to focus on what’s right in front of you and give your anxious mind a break from the outside world.
Learn More with these Additional Resources
Neuroplasticity and Implications for Mental Health
This expansive paper by Hanne Paust explores the connections between skill-building, creativity, neural plasticity, and mental health. Paust elaborates that skill-building doesn’t have to be complicated or time-consuming, and “for adults, 12 minutes of focused attention on the new skill is required in order to efficiently build a new neural network.”
The Healing Power of Music and Connection
“One study amongst many that finally caused a paradigm shift was conducted on four Swedish men dying of cancer. In the last days of their lives, they learned a new skill; knitting. Post mortem examination revealed that a brand new neural network had developed in their brains. The study proved that new neural networks can form in the brain through to the very last breath (for an overview of pioneering studies on neuroplasticity, see Doidge, 2010).”
Knitting to Reduce Stress
Learning to knit produced statistically and clinically significant improvements in cognition and perceived stress in cancer survivors in 8 weeks. “This skill-based pilot study suggests functional neuroplastic change is possible in selected female, college-educated cancer survivors in a short timeframe and without technology use.”
The Science of Practice
A summary of how practice can change the make-up of your brain and improve your life in all areas using the science of neuroplasticity. This article explores the importance of skill building as you age.
Decreasing Depression by Working with Your Hands
A summary of the connection between crafting and the “effort-driven rewards circuit”: Psychologist and neuroscientist Kelly Lambert explains that there are several parts of the brain that make up the “effort-driven rewards circuit” and engaging them might be the key to combating symptoms of depression.”Brain-wise, moving our hands activates larger areas of the cortex than the movement of other parts of the body such as our legs or back muscles. And more importantly, what drives that effort-driven rewards circuit are physical activities that involve our hands, particularly activities that produce tangible products that we can see, touch, and enjoy.” Engaging your hands with a hands-on activity like crochet or watercolor and producing a tangible product of your work is flexing your internal reward system and your brain is reaping the reward!
Keep your pandemic hobbies — your brain will thank you
Crafting is the key to long-term happiness by helping to establish a flow state while experiencing the joy of creating something new. “According to neuroscientist Dr. Stan Rodski, author of “The Neuroscience of Mindfulness”, hobbies promote a state of relaxation when they require three things: control, repetition, and focus. Experts have noted that such attributes can help a person enter what is called a flow state”
