Scotia Metalwork
J. Michael McRae
Edged Weaponry and Jewelry
With the "flavor" of the Highlands
Handmade Manifesto

    There was a time when everything that was used was made by someone that the user knew: bread by the baker, pots by the potter, cloth by the weaver, tools and hardware by the blacksmith. Somehow we have turned this all around.

    It started with the Industrial Revolution when machines were made to imitate what had been made by hand, to relieve us of the “burden” of work. The standard has shifted, too. Now we tend to judge handmade against what is made by machine. Look at your own life and see how many things you use everyday are made by a real person- a kitchen tool, a mug, a quilt? (Third world sweatshop labor counts as real people, but do you really want to support that kind of industry?)

    This also opens the question of Art or Craft? Art is beautiful, uplifting to the soul. Craft is another kind of beauty. It is attached to this world, down to earth, useful daily, but no less soulful. As I have worked in Craft I have come to see it as “the Art of the everyday”, a thing of beauty to use for the most mundane purpose: to hold your coffee, to cut your food, to warm you against the cold. Gibran writes: “Work is love made visible.” The person who made this object imbued it with love and his/her own person, and there is a spiritual connection to all the other craftspeople in the world.

    Machines can make some wonderful things, but a person can make them REAL. Revolution means a complete cycle, to turn around.


Be a revolutionary…buy handmade!

From The Declaration of Arbroath, 1320


...for, as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom -- for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
— Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love
"Every line of strength in American history is a line colored with Scottish blood."