A hobby, to me, is something to which I'm willing to devote time in my week, space in our tiny apartment, and also produces some kind of result, if even a small one. Order from the chaos of daily life, if you will. It's almost too casual of a word for things that produce a lot of joy.
My interests lie in several directions, but I try to keep them focused into just a few areas because anything I really get interested in is something I'll eventually spend a lot of money on as well. If I sort them by the order in which they take up space in my house, I'm first and foremost a hand quilter. My maternal grandmother, Granny, was a quilter before her eyesight went and the arthritis came, and my mom and I have many of her finished products, as do a lot of other people, I know. When I was a little girl, she gave me two quilts backed with Strawberry Shortcake fabric. I'm sure at the time I was totally obsessed with the Strawberry Shortcake characters. My cousin was in his Star Wars phase at the time, and the two quilts he got were backed with Star Wars fabrics. Granny didn't really do themed quilts; they were all made of scraps and remnants of clothes, but the backing material was generally new, because you have to have a lot of it. Sometimes they were bought clothes, sometimes they were scraps created of clothes she'd made for my mom, or herself, so they were really remnants AND scraps at the same time. Granny grew up during the Depression and never wastes anything (even now, she washes her paper towels. My generation could learn a lot from this--she's reduce, reuse, recycle in one package). Anyway, mom never let me use mine until I was an adult, so mine are in perfect condition and go on the spare bed, and my cousin's were probably in the trash a year after he got them, because they were his Favorite. Thing. Ever. and I know his mom let him use them until they fell apart. Not that anyone would be bitter about that, right? Suuuuure.
But I have a closet full of cotton fabrics, mostly carefully chosen and paid for at the astronomical rate of $8.98 a yard, which makes my granny cringe every time I mention it. I gave her the first quilt I ever finished, which was supposed to be a lap quilt but ended up hanging on her wall until my aunt moved it, and now I don't know where it is. I've finished several since then, mostly baby quilts. I do all the work by hand, although I've had a recent yen to want to learn to use a sewing machine, and I may finish my next baby quilt that way as a challenge. After that I think I may go on a baby quilt hiatus, I have several large projects calling to me from the closet, unfinished, and I'd really like to work on them before I forget what I was going to do with them in the first place.
It annoys the tar out of me to pay $4 a card to Hallmark for every birthday or minor holiday I'd like to recognize through the year, so another hobby I've been 'investing' in is card-making. Most of the materials overlap with scrapbooking, including stamps and ink, nice tidbits of textured or patterned paper, sparkly and shiny pens, colored pencils and water colors, ribbons, stickers (!!) and lately, punches that create positive and negative space designs. The box of card-making supplies overfloweth, and dwarfs the huge box of sewing notions already on my tiny desk. I'm not sure at this point that I'm averaging less than $4 a card when I make one, but I do try to get versatile materials that I can reuse when I can. I get a big thrill from being able to just to dig in the box on someone's birthday and spend fifteen minutes putting together something that's perfect ...well, to be honest, they are slightly less than perfect, as are my quilts, but the thought was there, right? I didn't just swerve into Walgreens on my way over, swearing at being late and still needing a g-d- card, right? That's not how I want to celebrate birthdays, or Mother's Day, or pretty much any day for that matter.
The perfume hobby (habit, really) actually takes up less space than both of the other two, but that's because perfume is awfully concentrated. I've always been one of those super-smellers--if you're making popcorn in the office, I'll be the first to smell you unwrapping the plastic. I discovered the totally obsessive online world of perfume oils about two years ago, and since then I've probably acquired a hundred little bottles and say, three or four hundred little samples. 'Little bottles', in this instance, mean 5mL bottles, or 1/6 of a fluid ounce. The samples are typically 1/32 ounce, or roughly 1mL. I have a pretty rough idea how much I've spent on this hobby since I started, and I'll never admit it to a soul. Our conversation would have to be protected by law, let's just say. The space investment? A train case on top of my dresser, plus some space on my dresser, a little space in the kitchen, a little space in the bathroom, a little space by my chair in the living room, a little bag under my desk, a bigger bag in my quilting closet...ok. It does take up a lot of space, I admit. The time investment? Huge, since I help run an online forum dedicated to the discussion and swapping of scent samples, and I swap them myself, for which I keep around packing materials, tape, bubble mailers, and even a postal scale. The result? I smell great, every day, and I always have at least one thing to wear in the morning that fits, which is a hell of a plus when your weight keeps going up and down the scale like a beginning pianist.
I think that may be all the hobbies I have time for. I don't really consider reading a hobby, since although there is a time investment involved in reading, a lot of my reading is re-reading and is just brain candy for when I'm bored. There are some subjects I love to research, but they produce no results other than a little satisfaction at apprehension. I don't consider cooking a hobby, although I love to do it, because on some level that's also a chore--you have to cook the food if you want to eat it--and that can take the fun out of it. I don't really collect anything specifically anymore. I used to, but the risk is that someone will decide that all you ever want is, say, cat themed items, and some of them are ugly, and some of them are from the Dollar General, but by god you can't get rid of them because don't you know your great aunt Sally picked that out for you, etc. It just collects dust, and I've come to the point in life that I'd rather not spend the time dusting anything I didn't absolutely love.
I'm not interested in knitting, despite the very deep interest shown by most of my friends. I get the beauty of hand-dyes and the lusciousness of exotic materials, but I get the same thing out of a good hand-dyed bolt of fabric, too, and I honestly think a lot of knitted projects I see in pictures are really ugly. My friends often have the talent to see something beautiful at the root, but it quite escapes me, just as taking a yard of fabric and cutting it into tiny pieces may baffle them. I've no problems dissecting a scent to say it has notes of jasmine, magnolia, leather, and wood, but most fiber crafts are just too deconstructed for me.
Someday? I'd really like to have the time, space, money, and energy to put into a really lovely dollhouse. I'd pick an era and theme it all to match, colors, furniture styles, clothes. I'd spend years assembling it, making little things for it, getting it just so. Not for any real reason, or result, just putting a little order back into the chaos of a daily life. Just for the joy of doing it.
Happy holiday weekend, y'all. Hope it's a good one.
