Amazing craft hobbies you can learn in the comfort of your own home
This is the age of arts and crafts. Say what you want about home projects: they’re the ultimate means of passing time and keeping busy.
And on top of that, if you hone your skills, you can potentially sell your creations and make money.
There’s a whole industry around discovering, practicing, and promoting arts and crafts. It isn’t an endeavor that takes much out of your day. You don’t need to sell your idea as a tech startup does. What you need is to stay true to your craft, keep practicing, and express yourself.
Not quite sure what you want to do? Here’s an extensive list of all the cool things you can do in the comfort of your own home.
Dressmaking
Dressmaking is a lost art. It’s relegated to fashion houses and mass production lines. Why don’t more people do it? It’s an incredibly fun and meditative way to get your creative juices flowing.
You can purchase fabric by the metre online at amazing prices. You can create your own set of designs you want to bring into existence. It is a fascinating process. It’s creativity through and through. The only barrier to entry is one’s confidence.
Every artist has their slight (or massive) misgivings about their creations. People tend to not like their art. But clothes may be the most difficult to overcome. Clothes were meant to be worn and flaunted. So don’t be shy! Use templates and fashion styles you love. Once you get the hang of it, you can branch out and explore what you can create.
Rock painting
Lots of people get into arts and crafts to create a new income stream. It’s a very profitable business sphere. Others, on the other hand, just want to make stuff.
One of the sneakiest and most fun arts and crafts projects is rock painting. It doesn’t seem like much but thrown into a different context, it automatically becomes amazing. If you paint rocks and leave them along hiking trails, you’ll blow the minds of fellow hikers.
Imagine going up a hill – the steepest hill you’ve ever had the painful pleasure of climbing, and you see a painted rock saying “keep going!” Wouldn’t that make your day? That would instantly be the best hike that anybody had ever been on.
Or you could start making galaxy rocks. Leave those all around and put a website on it to see where they end up. That should be fun.
Bottle cutting
Are you a fan of wine? If you are, you could be tossing a great opportunity for some fun and interesting crafts. All you need is a bottle cutter and enough bottles laying around to practice on.
The first thing is first though, get yourself a pair of cut-proof gloves. Not to say the bottle cutters themselves don’t cut clean. But there is a learning curve in terms of how much pressure to apply and how to add the finishing touches.
Once you’ve got your cut-proof gloves, you can pretty much go through any bottle you want. You can create whole drinking glass collections. You can use port bottles for vases. You can cut them near the base and make ashtrays.
You can even paint them and attach them to light fixtures for a cool, repurposed, hipster vibe. Any place you could use an empty vessel, you can use cut and smoothed out bottles.
Wine cork board
Going a little further on the wine ideas, you can collect the corks you have and make a wine corkboard. Have you seen those? They’re adorable.
First, you need to make it so the cork height is relatively even. They don’t have to be exact, but the closer they are height-wise, the easier it will be to pin on evenly. Have a standard measure and a handy craft knife ready.
From there, it’s establishing a base, which can be anything that’s solid and responds well to adhesives (plywood is perfect for this), and gluing the corks on. Add your pizzazz to it, and voila! You have a wine corkboard.
Wreath making
Wreath making used to be huge. It used to be part of seasonal traditions across Europe. Somewhere along the way, making wreaths fell out of fashion. People started to buy them, then they kind of phased out altogether.
Keeping the tradition alive, we can make wreaths out of virtually anything. The most economical and fun means of making them is with cupcake lining. You have all sorts of colors, themes, and designs that are sold every few months.
This means that you can continually make and change out your wreath depending on what’s happening that season. All you need is a foam wreath from a craft store, some push pins, glitter, and the cupcake liners.
Take one or two of the liners and fluff them up to a point where they break away from their rigid form and start looking more and more like a carnation. Take your push pin, press it into the styrofoam, and do that until you cover the whole styrofoam area. It’s that simple.
Adult coloring books
If you’re looking for something to do and you haven’t the slightest idea what you want to get into, it can be as easy as printing out adult coloring book pages.
A few years back, adult coloring books promised everything from entertainment, all the way up to reducing anxiety. Whether or not it did all that is up to interpretation. But what adult coloring books provide is a means for people to focus on a singular, simple, and fairly mindless task.
That act alone is enough to bring a sense of calm over any individual. You can print individual pages out anytime you want in the convenience of your own home.
That’s probably the biggest advantage outside of the calming aspect. You just need colors. You don’t need anything else. You don’t need to go to the craft store. You don’t need to find a specialty bookstore that sells them. You can just log onto your computer, google the content, and print it out. Perfect.
Knitting
There is one craft that has stood the test of time. It’s come back over the past few years with the rising interest in manual tasks in the digital age. That craft is knitting.
Knitting may bring back images of your grandmother by the fireplace, making mittens for you and your siblings, sure. But in reality, the creative aspect of this craft is so useful, it’s a wonder that more people don’t do it.
In the coming colder months, going out and buying sweaters, gloves, and scarves can get pricey. It’s safe to say that many people are losing out due to the global economic climate.
If we know how to knit, we eliminate the financial aspect outside of yarn. They also make wonderful gifts. Getting something warm and soft, made by hand, has so much more soul than a store-bought scarf.
Most knitted items are passed down as heirlooms. Sometimes they get used, sometimes they get put in a box with old pictures. But in the end, it’s a piece of something you made with your own two hands. That’s a beautiful thing.
Hanging fixtures
Hanging fixtures are always a wonderful addition to any home. There’s something about the utility and space-saving aesthetics of hanging fixtures that brighten up any open space.
One of the coolest and most unique fixtures are a series of hanging vases. Small, colorful plants inside beautifully polished bulbs strung together with twine is the kind of aesthetic that brightens up a living space. What you do is you get a large, clear light bulb, a good source of light, and a pair of pliers. Peel off the thin metal conduction unit from the bottom.
From there you can start working on the black cap that attaches to the internal filament. Once you pop that off, the filaments should come out with it. There you have it! You have an empty bulb vessel. Turn it upside down, string some twine or wire around the spiral base, and you’ve got yourself a hanging vase!
Add seasonal flowers and aromatic plants to it. If you want, you can paint the vase. But in all honesty, the clean contrast between the bulb and roots make for an already beautiful look. You don’t have to do anything else to it if you don’t want to.
Mirrors
Mirrors make a bedroom. When you walk into a room, the most distinguishing features may be the bed and the vanity. But the mirrors give the room a well lived-in, bright look. Maybe it’s because of the bouncing light. Maybe it’s because we like to look at ourselves. Either way, the mirror provides the same sense of presence as a good piece of art.
Mirrors give one an avenue to create that is often overlooked. Why not design around it? Some of the coolest mirrors go for thousands of dollars. In all honesty, it can probably be done with a bit of practice and innovation. Start small.
Take a lightweight, 8-inch circular mirror and a thick piece of circular foam at least twice the size of the mirror. Measure out the thickness of the mirror itself and cut that into the foam. This is going to take some time. You want the mirror flush along the surface of the foam.
Once you get it, glue the mirror in place, wait for it to set and dry. Now you’re ready to start creating. You can pin anything you want onto the foam. You can go for a floral look. You can add washed oyster shells. You can go George of the Jungle and have plants all over it.
You can go high end and mimic your favorite designers. As long as you paint or cover the foam with the predominant color of your choice or a cool contrast, you’re fine. You can add anything.
Jewelry
Making jewelry has a massive following, We’ve all been invited over to people’s houses so they can showcase what they’ve made. That tradition goes way, way back. It’s been a staple among book clubs and socio-civic institutions since forever.
If you haven’t tried it, you really should! You can look online for all sorts of lovely pieces. You can learn how to compare and contrast different colors and materials. You can practice setting stones into place. You can lend your creative ideas to any variation of precious, semi-precious, or show beads you want.
A wide assortment of beads is readily available online or at your local craft store, so it’s not difficult to find supplies for jewelry making. Moreover, beading supplies are relatively cheap, which makes jewelry making an affordable hobby to try. There are expensive bead and gemstone options too if you want to create high-end jewelry.
What are you into? What are the pieces you saw in movies and TV and said: “wow, that’s gorgeous”? Now is your chance to make those in the comfort of your own home. Be sure to get a reliable glue gun, a magnifying lamp, and a place to work. You’ll instantly fall in love with the idea of making, wearing, and possibly selling your jewelry.
If you make some truly amazing pieces or replicas of your favorite famous pieces then why not show them off? You can display them in fun ways like with luminati display cases.
Chalkboard
You can turn anything into a chalkboard. This is especially fun in a home office, a kitchen cabinet, or a child’s room. There’s a special paint called, aptly enough, chalkboard paint. You can paint the inside of a cupboard for an ongoing grocery list. No more pieces of paper stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet.
You can paint a section of the wall in your child’s playroom. Now that the majority of the world is focusing on home-based work and home-based school, a chalkboard is a tremendous idea.
If you don’t want it anymore, you can always get some paint stripper and repaint that section of the wall. It’s the perfect non-permanent experiment in drawing, wall doodling, and office organization. Yes, the chalk can be a bit dusty. But all you have to do is wipe it off properly and you’re good. Problem solved.
There are a million and one creative things you can do on your own time, at home. It’s a matter of how much time you want to put in. Buying fabric and materials online is incredibly easy. So just mix and match! Do whatever you want. Explore. Create. The most important thing though, is that you enjoy your new hobby.
