A handmade gift carries decisions that no price tag can describe completely.

Making something for a person spends a currency that appears on no label. Hours, revisions, the wrong colour started again, the decision about what they would like: all of it is present in the object and none of it is legible as a number. That is why handmade gifts are awkward to receive and hard to reciprocate, since no obvious equivalence exists. What is being handed over is a portion of somebody’s time.

If you are given something made, ask how long it took and what was hardest. Those questions receive the gift more accurately than thanks alone.