The American Arts and Craft movement of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries arose in reaction to the Industrial Revolution. Proponents of this movement feared that industrialization, resulting in a division of labor between production and design, would lead to the demise of traditional handcrafts in the United States. In the mid-twentieth century, manual skill decline accelerated an “overly pessimistic” view of crafts as dying, which persists today. Recently, the emergence of the digital craft marketplace with websites like Etsy.com has given birth to an “overly optimistic” view that crafts are in fact thriving. This study puts these contradictions into relief, showing that neither narrative on its own is sufficient to explain the present state of crafts and craft occupations in the United States, nor predict their future viability. Taken holistically, these narratives provide a more complicated picture and shed light on changing social meanings and value of crafts and craft occupations.