How craft and other pastimes are promoting the art of letting go

Three years ago "life was very blurry" and Kate felt like she'd hit rock bottom, so enrolled in a mental health course through the Wollongong-based MakeShift.

It showed her that pastimes like gardening, drawing, or learning an instrument were ways to calm her mind.

"It brings me some joy, which I needed because I was really stuck. Some days are harder than others, but now my husband just tells me to go and play my ukulele if I'm having a bad day," she says in the new book Creative First Aid.

Kate's story is one of many featured in the practical guide by MakeShift founders Caitlin Marshall and Lizzie Rose after Murdoch Books caught wind of how they were putting the spark back into people's lives.

"GPs and psychologists ... got in touch with us and said 'I'm sending my patients to your classes as a form of treatment because engaging in these workshops is helping decrease anxiety levels and depression'," Rose said.

"Then participants were coming up to us and saying, 'I haven't felt this way in such a long time, I'm starting to feel a bit calmer and a bit more connected'."

The pair both started their lives in the nation's capital, born at the same hospital six months apart, both delivered by long-time Canberra obstetrician Bryan Cutter.

While they both left the city as young children, over the years they've maintained a connection with Canberra, running workshops as part of the Australian Design Festival.

The pair began as a social enterprise more than a decade ago, running workshops in the Illawarra community that taught skills like sourdough making, permaculture and craft.

Since then, their work has evolved to a national scale, helping people including first responders, the lonely or people affected by natural disasters.

Rose recalls working with a community devastated by bushfires, then floods, and the COVID-19 pandemic, many of them older Australians who had "lived through a lot".

"We did some 'blind contour drawing' together where we all drew each other's portrait on a piece of paper without looking at the paper and without lifting the pen off the paper," she said.

"Everybody's picture was pretty wonky and pretty funny, and at the end [83-year-old] Margaret's face was beaming and her eyes were all twinkling. Then she said 'I felt like I just drew breath for the first time in so long'.

"Being creative is a little bit like drawing breath. It's like taking a breath in and then having a nice exhale, even if it only lasts for a few moments."

Creative First Aid features 50 creative "prescriptions" to try at home, along with stories from those who have found their way through trauma, anxiety, grief, and chronic illness.

Rose says you just have to find what "resonates" with your soul, whether that's starting a veggie patch, joining a cold-water swimming group, painting, or strumming a ukelele.

"It's something that we can work with ourselves and do any day without having to spend a lot of money or go out and buy a whole heap of materials," Rose said.

"If we've got everything we need - rest and shelter and food and water - we will naturally play. And I think it's something that we forget to do as adults as life gets pretty serious and pretty busy."