Recently, I was introduced to the Mutton Birds song, A Thing Well Made. In it, the singer describes his trade — a shop selling sporting goods. At the heart of the song is the following eulogy to a gun he picks up:
To make a thing like that you’d need to know what you were about.
You’d need to know where you were going and go there in a straight line,
And everything else you’d have to shut right out.
Can you see the man who made that?
Can you see him putting it down and standing back?
Can you see the moment when he said “that’s it, that’s perfect?”
At a time like that you wouldn’t care about your job,
Or your mortgage,
Or the fight you had with your wife.
‘Cause when a man holds a thing well made, there’s connection.
There’s completeness when a man holds a thing well made.
Over the years I have seen, heard, felt, or owned many things that gave me just this feeling. This song is one of them. This new blog is a place to gather those things together. Some of them are design classics or well-known in their field to be well-crafted. That is irrelevant to me. The only test is whether I have experienced them directly and whether I think they are things well-made.
