The Benefits of Hobbies

    I have to say I am learning a lot by finally doing my hobbies.  I am gaining confidence and getting really excited about things.  I can't tell you how much the notion of waiting until you are older and have more time for hobbies has been beaten into me.  In reality if we don't make time now are we going to make time later. 

    I have been so much more adventurous in some of the stuff I try.  And I have even jumped into things without all the knowledge of how to do them.  Which can be kind of awesome if you don't need it to be professional level work.  Plus learning by doing is a legitimate way to learn things.

    For my business I create miniatures and figurines.  A lot of people love my snails, which I think I have gotten really good at.  In April I started making birds.  They did well at the bazaar that month.  I'd been wanting to try other animals and figures, this gave me confidence.   So after watching Kiki's Delivery Service for the first time I knew what I wanted to work on.  Cats!  It took several tries and a few weeks to get a shape down that I was happy with, but I finally achieved it.

    I set out to take a picture to share on Instagram and next thought was that I needed to make a yarn ball to go with the cat in the photo.  That didn't work as quickly or intuitively as I had hoped.  So I found my old set of crochet needles, grabbed the smallest one and turned out two small lines of stitches. (which was about the extent of my crocheting knowledge I had from my childhood)  I then tried to imagine how this might work with my cat to look like they had gotten into a bit of a mess playing with it.  That is when I decided to pull out some wire and tools and quickly, but carefully craft a miniature crochet hook.

A post shared by Lilian Brennan (@fairyoasis) on Apr 9, 2018 at 6:43pm PDT

    This was all great fun and got me thinking about finally learning more than the chain stitch.  I have seen some fantastic miniature cushions and potholders.  I have already been thinking about getting more embroidery thread to make tiny braided rugs.  Plus I want to find a tutorial on how to make miniature yarn balls.

    And this isn't the only thing I have started picking up again.  I have actually made some attempts at drawing again after more than ten years.  I'll have to talk about that another time.

    But seriously this has been amazing for me.  Do not wait to try things.  It is okay to be bad at first.  It's called learning.  Go learn something new today.

Tata,