We’re a big fan of all our clients, especially our crafty friends and colleagues! If you’re handmaking your gifts with love this holiday season, or wrapping up those presents with love, we wanted to send a little love your way this week.

We previously wrote about the benefits of sewing, but other crafts come with benefits too!

Quilting and Sewing

• Relieves stress

Not only can fabrics and colors be soothing, but the repetitive nature of quilting and other activities like painting fires up the system (parasympathetic) responsible for the unconscious activities while we’re at rest. Which helps to turn off the sympathetic nervous system responsible for fight-or-flight reactions and stress response.

• Increases mental wellbeing, especially for the elderly

With quilting, you get math and geometry problems to solve that are fun and doable, which pumps up self-confidence. These brain benefits can’t be obtained from exercise, so those with limited mobility can really benefit from quilting!

• Meaningful work makes you happy

Many of our quilters make items for loved ones, so they have a physical accomplishment to show off and the purpose of making them for someone else. All of which brings meaning, and the brain responds with plenty of reward chemicals at the completion of the project.

• Reduces risk of heart attack and stroke

Through quilting’s ability to relieve stress and provide pleasure and rewards, these risks drop. Quilting contributes to a decrease in blood pressure and heart rate, which is good for your health.

Other arts and crafts

In general, spending time on meaningful hobbies is good for your health because they relieve stress, as with quilters and those who sew. Arts and crafts can provide other benefits as well.

• Art increases empathy

Just looking at art has been shown to boost your critical thinking skills. Those who either view it or create it themselves tend to have more tolerance for other people as well as more empathy.

It seems like everyone could use a little empathy, especially during COVID-19 when so many of us are working from home. Giving yourself the opportunity to be creative and improve your emotional intelligence in a fun way sure sounds good to us!

• Arts and crafts help those with neurological conditions or other serious health concerns

Elderly patients with Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia reduces their symptoms and helps them be more sociable and happy. 

Other patients with severe illnesses find that it filled a void for them and gave them some purpose as well as preventing them from ruminating too much on their condition. Arts and crafts brings them not only stress relief, but also the ability to express their feelings better and no longer feel they’ve lost their identities.

• Creating new things boosts productivity

All those neurochemical rewards from creativity helps your brain build new neurons and strengthens the links between the right hemisphere and the left. This results in improved concentration and focus as well as productivity and resilience.

Gift-wrapping

Not only does wrapping a gift make the recipient happier with both the gift and the person giving it, this activity boosts the wrapper’s brain too. It helps develop fine motor skills, spatial skills, and coordination.

Using paper for wrapping is a tradition that dates back to before it was used for writing! In modern times, gift wrap turns things that have been commoditized or mass-produced into something personal. 

Stay healthy for the holidays

For all your arts and crafts and hobbies, it’s important to make sure you’re able to do them in a way that won’t cause you strains or sprains or other physical injuries. 

• When you’re standing, make sure that your table height is high enough you don’t have to bend down to do it.
• Put the things you use near you so you don’t have to strain to reach them.
• Make sure that your area is clear of items that could make you trip over them, and consider using non-slip and anti-fatigue mats for comfort.
• Don’t drink and drive!

If you’re looking for ways to lift your folding table for catering, crafting, working from home or anything else this holiday season, click here to find cost-effective solutions.