This article advocates an enlarged understanding of the benefits of manual creativity for critical thinking and affective making, which blurs the boundaries, or at least works in the spaces between or beyond amateur and professional craft practices and identities. It presents findings from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project: Co-Producing CARE: Community Asset-based Research & Enterprise (https://cocreatingcare.wordpress.com). CARE worked with community groups (composed of amateur and professional textile makers) in a variety of amateur contexts: the kitchen table, the community cafe, the library, for instance, to explore how critical creative making might serve as a means to co-produce community agency, assets and abilities. The research proposes that through 'acts of small citizenship' creative making can be powerfully, if quietly, activist (Orton Johnson 2014; Hackney 2013a). Unlike more familiar crafts activism, such 'acts' are not limited to overtly political and public manifestations of social action, but rather concern the micro-politics of the individual, the grass roots community and the social everyday. The culturally marginal, yet accessible nature of amateur crafts becomes a source of strength and potential as we explore its active, dissenting and paradoxically discontented aspects alongside more frequently articulated dimensions of acceptance, consensus and satisfaction. Informed by Richard Sennett's (2012) work on cooperation, Matt Ratto and Megan Bolar (2014) on DIY citizenship and critical making, Ranciere's (2004) theory of the 'distribution of the sensible', and theories of embodied and enacted knowledge, the authors interpret findings from selected CARE-related case studies to explicate various ways in which 'making' can make a difference by: providing a safe space for disagreement, reflection, resolution, collaboration, active listening, questioning and critical thinking, for instance, and offer quiet, tenacious and life-enhancing forms of resistance and revision to hegemonic versions of culture and subjectivity.

Campus since the inception of the Archive Service in 2008. She has embraced the opportunity to establish the Service across a wide range of Higher Education disciplines, with a particular focus on the use of collections in undergraduate teaching. Sarah's teaching role led her to complete a Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education in 2014. Sarah is a member of The National Archives Higher Education Archive Partnership Steering Group (HEAP) and outside of her university role supports Wheal Martyn Museum in the development of the archive of the China Clay History Society. Hannah Maughan, MA RCA, is a Senior Lecturer on the BA (Hons) Textile Design course at Falmouth University, where she has taught since 2003. Hannah established and leads the mixed media discipline within the course, with her teaching practice and research interests focusing on the past and present of embroidery, through the duality of traditional hand and contemporary digital design and making processes, and through social and cultural context. In 2016 Hannah received the Embroiderers' Guild Beryl Dean Award for Teaching Excellence in recognition of her subject commitment, her significant contribution to the teaching of embroidery at HE level, and for salvaging Hazel Sims' unique embroidery collection for the university archive.