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posted by martyb on Monday August 14 2017, @08:33AM   Printer-friendly
from the craft!=boat dept.

Over at Hackaday is a pointer to The Heritage Crafts Association list of endangered crafts:

The Industrial Revolution brought mechanisation and mass production, and today very few of the products you use will be hand-made. There may still be a few craftsmen with the skills to produce them by hand, but in the face of the mass-produced alternative there is little business for them and they are in inevitable decline. In an effort to do something about this and save what skills remain, the Heritage Crafts Association in the UK has published a list of dying crafts, that you can view either alphabetically, or by category of risk.

It’s a list with a British flavour as you might expect from the organisation behind it, after all for example hand stitched cricket balls are not in high demand in the Americas. But it serves also as a catalogue of some fascinating crafts, as well as plenty that will undoubtedly be of interest to Hackaday readers.

Obviously this is UK specific, as many of these crafts survive elsewhere in the world. However the links to individual crafts provide the history, techniques, and further background on each area. The hackaday comment threads also contain some additional suggestions.


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Monday August 14 2017, @01:59PM

    by GreatAuntAnesthesia (3275) on Monday August 14 2017, @01:59PM (#553658) Journal

    Yes, it's a linguistic thing. "Craft" originally meant "skilled profession that involves making something". Boat builders, coopers, weavers, blacksmiths and farriers, all that kind of stuff. I guess it grew to encompass similar tasks done on an amateur basis and from there to any kind of hobby that involves making something.

    Obviously, as more and more manufacturing jobs have been replaced by machines, the original meaning died off somewhat and left us with a dominant meaning of "gluing together home-made birthday cards." The original meaning still holds, though, at least here in Eastpondia. I don't find it at all odd to describe dry-stone walling or reed-fence weaving as crafts.

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