It seems like there’s a day and a month designated to just about every cause, awareness, and activity out there. This month, we honor the handmade with National Handmade Day, which is celebrated each year on the first Saturday in April. So grab your glitter and yarn, roll up your sleeves, and get ready to create.

National Handmade Day is a time to honor the tradition of making unique, one-of-a-kind items with both your hands and your heart. Whether it’s toys, soaps, pottery, jewelry, baked goods, or woodworks, they are material expressions of an artist’s talents, made to bring a smile to the faces of family members, friends, or customers. These handmade products could be the continuation of a family tradition or a hobby you just decide to adopt on your own. Either way, they’re completely unique, creative items you’ve brought to life with the utmost care.

National Handmade Day was first celebrated in 2018, so the observance is still pretty new. The practice of creating goods by hand, however, has been practiced by our ancestors for millennia. In the centuries before the birth of Christ, potters and metalworkers in Greece created ceramics and items in bronze, each of them signed by their maker.

In the Medieval era in Europe, guilds formed, bringing these artisans together, everyone from weavers to carpenters. These guilds were founded to regulate prices and quality of product. During these years, crafters made making and selling their creations their entire livelihood.

Everything changed during the Industrial Revolution. Between the late 18th and early 20th centuries, inventions such as the power loom led to factories opening and the shuttering of smaller craft stores. Machines – and with them, the ability to produce a greater number of items in a shorter time span -- threatened the livelihood of artisans whose income was dependent on sales of their one-of-a-kind items.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, however, figures such as American craftsman and furniture maker Gustav Stickley promoted the benefits and quality of handmade pieces over mass-produced goods, joining a movement designed to breathe new energy into handmade creations and to lessen the power given to machinery and automation (today, of course, authorized dealers of Stickley furniture can now be found across the U.S.).