Handwork and Handicrafts - Waldorf Research Institute

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APPENDIX I
The Pedagogical Value of Making Animals in Soft Handwork
It has become customary at the Waldorf school to call needlework and the crafts
“soft” and “hard” handwork respectively. This points to an important difference between the
two fields of activity, the full extent of which one can realize only as time goes on. It is not
only that different materials are used, but that through working with these materials quite
different soul-forces in the child are awakened and brought into activity. And although the
educational value of the two activities can be said to lie in separate spheres, they complement
each other in a wonderful way and often flow together or overlap, owing to the great variety
of things that can be made in both soft and hard handwork.
To begin with, let us see in what ways they are different. We have taken as our
example the animal, which is shaped in wood in hard handwork and in soft handwork is first
sewn together out of flat pieces of material and then receives its form from within outwards
through stuffing. In hard handwork we are dealing with wood. We hammer, plane, carve,
and so forth. Here strong forces of will make use of the limbs of the child to work creatively
upon the outer world. In soft handwork the spun and woven materials are handled with great
care. The bright colors bring joy to the heart and the senses, and the child tries with loving
understanding to bring them into relation one with another. Soul-forces of a feeling nature
are active here. They are connected not with the limbs but with the streaming of blood and
breath in the breast region of the human being, and thus the hands are used only as a means
of bringing to outer manifestation what is experienced inwardly.
Just as a living stream of water forms and changes the rock from outside, so does the
living will, working at the wood from outside, create out of the life-forces the work of art,
the animal. Life-forces stream to the human being from the Cosmos; soul-forces take hold of
him inwardly and give form to the body from within outwards.
Just as soul and spirit are working creatively in the human being when, between
the ages of seven and fourteen, they mold and ensoul the physical body and its organs from
within, so does the child work upon the animal in the handwork lesson, stuffing it to give
it form from within outwards. The animal is also, as it were, ensouled by the child in this
way. It is often quite astonishing to see how the child brings to expression his temperament,
his own being, in the animal he makes, and we get, for example, not only choleric lions, but
phlegmatic and melancholic ones. Wit and humor very frequently come out in the animals,
which are nearly always the favorite toy of the child, even while they are still being made.
Dolls, too, belong to this sphere. “Let them make laughing dolls, dolls that express
a soul-mood,” Steiner once said to us. The girls make both dolls and animals with great