What is your favorite tool? Do you have a needle you've bent to just the right curve? How about a pair of pliers that twist your wire exactly the way you want it? Maybe you have a favorite pair of tweezers, or you like your bead spinner for stringing bead crochet. Perhaps we can talk about those tools another time, because the tools we all like best aren't products, they are our hands! Our hands are uniquely our own and the most important tools we have. So it is especially important to take good care of them. Some beaders have callouses where a needle pokes them repeatedly. If I am doing lots of bead crochet, I get a callous on one finger where the crochet hook pushes through the work and butts up to my finger on every stitch. Callouses are one thing. Overuse injuries are something else. An artist friend made an amazing crocheted work and then couldn't crochet for weeks because her hands were too sore. I injured my hand clearing ice off my driveway in 2009. I tried 15 months of physical therapy before submitting to surgery that stopped the pain and gave me back full range of motion. It didn't "correct" the problem, though. It simply severed a permanently inflamed sheath aruond a tendon. The months of therapy and fearful prospect of the surgery were important reminders to me to take care of my hands. I try to stretch them, strenghten them, exercise them and rest them. My therapist had me doing stretching exercises that involved wrapping a rubber band around my hand and expanding it by stretching my fingers as far apart as they could go. He had me squeezing Airputty to strengthen my hands (you can use rubber balls instead). I did regular hand exercises that included touching my thumbs to my pinkys, then each fingertip in succession. I bent my fingers carefully backwards with my oopposite hand. When my hand was originaly injured, I had it xrayed. The good news was that I had no arthritis. After my surgery, my doctor said I might have a little arthritis and I told him about the xray. He told me that those months of inflammation could have created some arthritis! My same friend who crochets believes you can be an artist your whole life. I agree. In order to keep creating, though, we need to take care of our tools, starting with our hands!