Rejuvenation in the "making": Lingering mood repair in textile handcrafters

A variety of activities can help people improve their bad moods. We propose activities that are engaging, arousing, and associated with the mental state of flow can be particularly helpful and inspire what we call rejuvenation. Rejuvenation, as we conceive it, is a state of feeling restored, renewed, and ready to start anew, which continues beyond immediate participation in a mood-repair activity. To explore this model, we examined rejuvenation in a sample of 435 women, all experienced in some form of textile handcrafts. Consistent with our model, we found that textile-handcraft activities rated as rejuvenating (i.e., mixed media, surface design, quilting, weaving, spinning, and dyeing) were also rated as arousing and engaging. In fact, higher levels of arousal and higher levels of engagement were associated with higher levels of rejuvenation (hereafter termed textile rejuvenation). Adapting Waterman et al.'s (2003) Personally Expressive Activities Questionnaire (PEAQ), we asked each participant to specify the 1 activity she considered to be most important to her self-definition. Based on the nature of their most self-defining or PEAQ activity, we then categorized participants as an art maker or a nonart maker. Compared to nonart makers, women categorized as art makers (69%) reported greater rejuvenation (hereafter termed PEAQ rejuvenation), flow, personal expressiveness, self-realization of values, and skill and challenge during art-making. For the art-maker group, mood repair during an activity, flow, and self-realization of values predicted PEAQ rejuvenation. These outcomes could not be explained by indicators of well being, age, income, or education. A state of rejuvenation, it seems, may linger after participation in (a) textilehandcraft activities that are arousing and engaging, and (b) PEAQ activities that are high in mood repair, flow, and self-realization of values.