We live in times of crisis. This paper explores the importance and potential wider ramifications of what we term ‘small acts of care’ through findings from two research projects: Crafting with Mother: a qualitative research study, and S4S: Designing a Sensibility for Sustainable Clothing, in which participants worked with textiles in creative, collaborative ways. Looking through the lens of feminism, material culture and affect, reveals how these experiential making processes locate care rather than competition at the centre of social relations as participants attune to others and other situations, and begin to forge alternative agencies, values, and ways of being-in-the-world. Following Sara Ahmed’s (2004) economic model of emotion, we understand affect as collective, social and relational rather than personal - operating in communities as objects and purposeful activities bind people together. Affect is imbricated in how we operate in the world, what anthropologist Kathleen Stewart (2011: 445-6) drawing on Heidegger’s (1962) concept of worlding terms ‘atmospheric attunements’ whose registers respond to worlds composed of ‘qualities, rhythms, forces, relations, and movements’ and shift according to particular crises. Bad feelings can be turned to productive use as creative interventions open new affect worlds (Cvetkovich, 2003). This paper argues that, viewed through the lens of feminism and material affect, the changing relations that occur through processes of collaborative making foreground practices of care and connection rather than competition and isolation. Forging new agencies and attunements that not only shift understandings of ourselves and others - who we are, what we value, and how we live our lives - but might also help us begin to address larger issues of trauma, and social and ecological collapse, and imagine better futures.