Between 2012 and 2015 I benefitted from an Arts and Humanities Research Council Collaborative Doctoral Award that allowed me to explore the relationship between manual creativity and mental health. My research was concerned with neglected affective, relational, material, and processual dimensions of amateur crafts practice in an arts-for-health context. It responded to the lack, in this field, of fine-grained, long-term, ethnographic work based on participant observation. It