The Beauty of Hand-Made in a Machine-Made World

By Ashley Ward

We’ve come so far in efficiency and consistency through the use of technology and machines. Factories can spit out clones of items in seconds, making material goods available to us at incredibly inexpensive cost and quick rate. From water bottles to jewelry, decorations to food - there’s a machine for almost everything. 

So why would anyone choose the inconvenience and expense of buying handmade? 

Items made by hand are done so slowly, with every piece set in place under the watchful eye of the maker. It takes time to design, plan, source and build an object from hand. A creative person is pulling from their own experience & imagination not a computer program or AI. 

One item differs from the next even if they are made from the same design because humans are dynamic beings that don’t produce outputs like a machine does but rather we infuse our personalities, our perspective, and sometimes our shaky hands into the items we create. We follow recipes that we created through weeks, months or years of experimentation - and even then we’ll get variation. We take inspiration from the world around us or from others who have gone before us but each item that we build and create becomes our own. Each item is one-of-a-kind.

Handmade items are often more expensive than their factory-produced counterparts because supplies and materials have been individually sourced by a person who doesn’t have access to huge amounts of capital or large suppliers like a big company would. We often buy ingredients from people we know or people in our community (and even if we order online, it’s done thoughtfully with our values taken into consideration which then translates to the finished product).

The durability of handmade items are unique to human limitations. Sometimes machines assemble low-quality items that fall apart easily and sometimes they help us build items made with such precision that they’re indestructible and no human could ever hope to compete. And that’s why we value handmade - because you know that the durability will only ever be as strong as is humanly possible and we connect more when we see our own humanity reflected. 

P.S. This essay was written entirely by me with no help from AI even though AI may have made a more clear and concise point for you. I opted to write this from scratch even though it took me a half hour and years of personal experience and thoughts on the subject. There are grammar mistakes, sentences that could have been written better and the flow could be better. But this is handmade. 

Thanks for reading :)

And come see all the handmade goods at the Marble Falls Handmade Market! We'll be there on May 3rd, 2025 from 10am-2pm at 618 Avenue L, Marble Falls, Texas.