This article explores how the practice of craft emerges through different contexts within which it is experienced. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with an artisanal household in the Telangana region of South India, this article focuses on the relationship between the household and the practice of craft in two distinct and interrelated ways. First, it reveals that the history of the practice of craft unfolds through the history of the household and its relational and hierarchical structures. Second, the household and collective performance among kin provide contexts for dialogue, exchange and ‘growth’, and, in the process, generate conditions for ‘critical making’. By looking at narratives of the members of the Danalakota household, the objective of the article is to reconstruct the experience of lived realities of craft and kinship.