What Does “Hand­made” Mean?

Forged Sil­ver Earrings

The words “hand­made,” “hand­crafted,” and “arti­san made”, which appear in many prod­uct descrip­tions on sites such as etsy.com, have dif­fer­ent appli­ca­tions. These range from prod­ucts assem­bled from man­u­fac­tured ele­ments to pieces crafted from scratch using basic mate­ri­als such as wire, sheet metal, stones, etc.

One can argue that a per­son who makes things from wire and sheet metal is also using mate­ri­als that are pre-formed since the artist did not make the wire or sheet metal from ore, so in a sense the word “hand­made” applies equally to both kinds of prod­ucts.  But I would argue that there is in fact a world of dif­fer­ence between string­ing beads–to take one example—and forg­ing a metal bracelet from sheet, because the skill sets are vastly different.

A bead stringer may pro­duce an orig­i­nal prod­uct, in the sense that the pre­cise com­bi­na­tion of beads in the design has never been seen before (not hard to accept due to the enor­mous vari­ety of beads avail­able.)  But the method, the string­ing itself, relies on a sim­ple set of oper­a­tions: putting a wire or cord through a hole in a bead and attach­ing a pur­chased find­ing (such as a clasp or pin) to fin­ish the piece.  In many cases, a piece of jew­elry pro­duced this way car­ries the label “handmade.”

By con­trast, an arti­san who forges a piece of flat metal into a sculp­tural shape must have a more com­plete knowl­edge base, such as  how metal moves when stretched or com­pacted and how dif­fer­ent metal alloys behave when heated or hammered—and must have mas­tered the tech­niques for con­trol­ling the shape of the form.  The more knowl­edge the arti­san has, the more advanced the result­ing form can be, and the process of learn­ing can be end­less.  This is why it seems ludi­crous to me to apply the word “hand­made” to both prod­ucts equally.

In between these two extremes are inter­me­di­ate cases where the process of cre­at­ing a piece of jew­elry is heav­ily depen­dent on machines.  One exam­ple is lost-wax cast­ing, a process that involves melt­ing a wax model out of a plas­ter sur­round and fill­ing the space with molten metal.  What results is a metal copy of the wax model.  It’s pos­si­ble to make copies of the orig­i­nal wax using a rub­ber mold of the result­ing metal piece.  The wax copies are then assem­bled into “trees” of up to 50 or 100 waxes and cast into metal by the lost-wax method, as before.  The artistry, the “hand­made” part, lies in mak­ing the wax model.  The ques­tion is, can each of the repli­cas be jus­ti­fi­ably called “handmade?”

When eval­u­at­ing a piece of jew­elry (or other “hand­made” item), con­sider the skills and knowl­edge that go into its mak­ing.  Some­times it’s not easy to see, but if you look care­fully you can usu­ally detect dif­fer­ences. Under­stand that a one-of-a-kind piece of jew­elry has more intrin­sic value than a piece that is one of many copies, in the same way that an orig­i­nal work of art is more valu­able than a print.

 See Ricco’s hand­made, one-of-a-kind jew­elry on Etsy