WHEN I look out of my window, I see a riot of colour. All the wonderful hues and tones of what the Americans call the Fall are there, laid out before me.

In the foreground, a maple. The sun catching its leaves turns them a luminous, blood red. Alongside the maple is a lilac tree, now gone the colour of radioactive mustard. In the middle distance, some sort of evergreen is staying as stubbornly verdant as the description suggests but the only other tree I can actually name is a silver birch. Now largely shorn of leaves, its near-white bark gleams in the glorious autumn light.

Drop me into a wood and I'd probably recognise these trees if they were there. Ask me to distinguish between a beech and an elm, or pick out the ash, the hazel and the willow in a clump of woodland, however, and I'd be bamboozled. Ask me if I could unravel a whittling pouch, choose a minijarn gouge and set to work whittling a free-form spoon out of a block of oak I'd just laugh. Then, when my head had stopped spinning, I'd shake it. I imagine, would most readers would have the same response.

Ben Law, on the other hand, would just get on the with the job. If you know the name it's because the episode of TV series Grand Designs in which he features is still the show's most popular. In part, that's because of the modest scale of his dwelling – a simple woodland home built of sweet chestnut – but mostly it's because Law, a woodsman who lives in the wonderfully-named Prickly Nut Wood in West Sussex, built the house with his own two hands. Well, his and those of a few other people who helped him. Impressed? You should be.

Law still lives and works in Prickly Nut Wood, and has done now for close to 25 years. But as well as being a media celebrity of sorts, he's increasingly finding himself at the sharp end of what's known as “the maker movement”. It's a broad coalition of mostly amateur craftspeople who are re-discovering artisanal practices commonplace a century ago but which seem glaringly out of place in our fast-moving, digitised present. Or used to.

“I think there is a generation of people making conscious lifestyle choices to do something different and to do something creative with their hands,” says Law. “In the past, people's jobs involved using their hands and doing things a lot more than they do now. So a lot of people are really wanting something more creative and simpler to get involved with – and when I say simpler I mean away from the hustle and bustle of being on the internet. They want something they can do and look at. They want to create something tangible they can use.”

In Law's experience, this “maker movement” isn't confined to these shores either. “I had a group for people over from Australia not that long ago and they were saying exactly the same thing, that everyone's wanting to create more with their hands,” he says. “I look at the whole spoon carving movement and it's amazing how many people are out there whittling spoons, and for most people that's the first contact they get with making something. Then from there, they're hooked and they want to do more.”

Another very visible example of the rise of the “maker movement” is The Great Pottery Throw Down. It began on BBC Two last week and pits 10 amateur potters against each other in a format now very familiar from programmes like The Great British Bake Off and its sartorial running mate, The Great British Sewing Bee.

“Making is the new baking” is its mantra, and the choice sound-bites don't stop there. “Pottery is almost as good as sex,” said one of the judges, ceramic artist Kate Malone. “It’s so physical and so fantastic.” We've all seen Ghost, so we know what she means. 

Knitting, of course, has been enjoying a renaissance for a few years now, but even so the figures continue to impress. Put me in a yarn shop instead of a copse and ask me what sort of needle I'd need for slip-stitching and I'd be just as fazed. Others, it seems, are made of sterner stuff: Google searches on the words “knitting for beginners” are up a staggering 250% since 2010.

January, apparently because it's the darkest month, is a hotbed of knitting activity with sales to match. And October, the month the clocks go back and the nights really start to draw in, is when the UK Hand Knitting Association holds its National Knitting Week. It's an excuse for the papers to wheel out pictures of “celebrity knitters” like Kate Moss and Kirstie Allsopp but among the seven million non-celebrity knitters recognised during this year's event was Betsan Corkhill, a pioneer of what's known as “therapeutic knitting”.

Corkhill runs Stitchlink, an organisation which uses crafts, in particular knitting and crocheting, as a healthcare tool to improve well-being and help tackle conditions as diverse as stress, chronic pain, depression and addiction. She has been working in tandem with NHS services since 2006.

Aside from the therapeutic benefits and the sense of satisfaction, another part of the appeal of making is the simplicity and earthiness of the basic raw materials.

“Prior to the revolution of plastics, there wasn't much that wasn't made of wood,” says Ben Law. “So it has always played an essential part in all of our lives and I think people are really starting to connect back to that now.”

And what's true of wood is also true of clay, the raw material for potters, and wool, which is spun into yarn for knitters. Unsurprisingly, hardcore knitters are now examining closely the provenance of their wool in the same way the slow food movement obsesses over where its produce comes from.

To that end a New Zealand-based maker of outdoor wear called Icebreaker has pioneered something called a Baacode. Through a unique number, the Baacode ensures that buyers can find out what kind of wool their garment uses and even which hill station's sheep provided it.

Sure, it's a little gimmicky. But it taps into our desire for the things we wear to look and feel natural, and for the things we use for intimate activities such as eating and drinking to have a connection to other people. Nobody's saying that food served from hand-thrown platters tastes any better, but there will certainly be an ineffable something to the meal that wouldn't otherwise be there. Call it a kind of aesthetic seasoning, if you like.

So from home knitters to craft beer makers to, yes, wielders of newly-acquired whittling pouches, there are plenty of people describing themselves as “makers” and proving it with their hands and their time. What they actually make may show varying degrees of proficiency and skill, but that's not really the point.

Mind you, if they do find some latent talent for whatever they've turned their hand to, the potential benefits are great, says Law. “The quality of life is going to be so rewarding that it's worth making that adjustment.”

With this renewed interest in old-fashioned crafts and artisanal practices, and with new and dynamic means of selling the goods and disseminating the ideas, Law is putting his woodland knowledge to good use: he has written a book.

Called Woodland Craft, it's a sort of how-to for those who really do want to get to grips with a minijarn gouge (to put you out of your misery, it's a Scandinavian tool used for gouging out the bowl bit of a spoon). The book opens with a run-through of tree varieties, from Alder to Willow (including the sweet chestnuts which are in such abundance in Prickly Nut Wood) and provides examples of the sorts of things each type of wood is used for. Did you know, for example, that lime is the preferred wood for carving? That oars, snooker cues and hockey sticks are all made from ash? That you can collect a gallon of birch sap in just a couple of days and use it to make wine? Me neither.

Mostly, though, Woodland Craft is a sort of 21st-century update of Herbet L Edlin's Woodland Crafts In Britain. Written by in 1949, it's a seminal work in its field both for the expertise of its author and because, as Law notes, it “gives a detailed perspective of the vary variety of different crafts that emanated from woodlands prior to the introduction of plastics in the 1950s”.

Accordingly, Law's book shows readers how to make simple things like a besom broom – basically a bunch of birch twigs, a fastening peg and a pole made from chestnut or ash – as well as staggeringly-impressive items such as rocking chairs, loungers, even caravans. He tells you how to steam-bend a walking stick, boil-bend roof ribs for a yurt (you'll need a 200 litre oil drum and a large fire for that) and make your own roof shingles. And what he doesn't know about the difference between radial and bastard shakes isn't worth knowing.

Perhaps the woodland craft that has most captured the public imagination to date is spoon carving. There's a shop in Hackney in London called Barn The Spoon whose proprietor, Barnaby Carder, makes and sells beautiful, hand-carved spoons and also runs workshops at the Green Wood Guild wood carving centre in East London. Far to the north, in the Cairngorms, is another oddly-named maker, Wooden Tom, who will teach you how to whittle your own spoon or, if you prefer, sell you a hand-carved whisky tumbler. And at all points between there are others doing the same: making, teaching, recruiting and inspiring.

There's even a festival – Spoonfest, held in Derbyshire in late July and billing itself as an “international celebration of the carved wooden spoon”. It's run by spoon-maker Robin Wood – how's that for nominative determinism? – and was launched in 2012, when Wood expected about 50 people to turn up. He found himself having to cater for four times that number and attendance has grown every year since.

The upside of all this making is fairly obvious. People get to be more creative and they get to learn a skill, and from both those things a degree of self-esteem and empowerment flows. But there are other bonuses too. In Ben Law's area of expertise, for instance, much of the wood for high-end crafts comes from managed or “coppiced” woodlands. The more demand there is, both in terms of people wanting to buy hand-crafted goods and people wanting to learn how to make them, the more emphasis will be placed on preserving what woodland we have left and nurturing new stock.

So if you've recently taken a fancy to relocating somewhere rural and opening a pottery studio or a spoon-carving business or simply want to buy a flock of sheep and learn how to spin your own yarn, the message is simple: do it. And if the internet and the rise of the smartphone seem like the villains in this story, they needn't be. Websites such as Folksy work as great marketplaces for hand-crafted goods. You have to sift through a lot of knitted cats and Game Of Thrones-themed tat, but the site's own statistics suggest that up to 10 per cent of its users are making a living through it.

Of course the one thing you can't knit, crochet, carve or throw is time. So if you do have a yen to join the army of makers, you had better start being a doer too: get on with it, in other words.

Woodland Craft by Ben Law is out now (GMC, £25)