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Thread: How did you get interested in your hobby?

  1. #11
    Senior Member Ultralight's Avatar
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    I have enjoyed reading these. It seems like many of you all like gardening. I went through a two year gardening hobby phase. I had a couple community garden plots and then a plot in my sister's side yard.

    I have had many hobbies over the years.

    My first serious hobby was mixed martial arts/grappling. I competed in jju jitsu tournaments for a few years in high school. My dad forced me to take martial arts. That is how I got into that. During that time I also taught myself to play guitar, so I played in some folk duos and rock bands through college. I got into music listening to a blues radio program called The Sunday Night Root-hoot. So I decided to learn to play.

    I have also gotten into sporting clays shooting, archery (primitive, trad, and modern), hunting, meditating, tabletop gaming, and a bunch of others. I have had as many reasons for getting into these hobbies as I have had hobbies.

    Woven through all these episodic hobbies have been reading and fishing. I love both of them! When I read my first book at age 14 I thought: "Real rebels read books. I am going to be a brooding, young intellectual who is always reading." So I read to rebel. No one in my social circles was a reader.

    As for fishing, it is a family tradition. If my niece or nephew want to learn to fish I will teach them our family's traditional methodology, which is highly stylized, unique, often counter-intuitive, but god dang effective.

    At the moment my episodic hobbies are drawing and baseball fandom.

    Drawing is solitary, and I like that. It is also expressive and exercises brain muscles I have not used before. Baseball fandom is social and is a spectacle which I enjoy.

  2. #12
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    Quilting! I made the first one because an employee wanted to go on a mission to VietNam and needed to raise $2800 (this is 1993). i had just watched a show the day before called "Quilt in a Day" on PBS. I thought: well, we can do this and raffle it. So I offered to pay for the fabric if a group would come make it. It was so much fun, she bought fabric for a 2nd. We did a raffle at work. Raised $1500!!!!!

    I've been quilting since then and have quite a stash. I do a lot of charity quilts for my community and of course, quilts for family, for gifts.....etc......

    Gardening: I fall into the "now that I can afford broccoli I'd rather grow it" group. I've been increasing my food gardening prowess since 1995. My goal is to grow and store 80% of our needs by the time I retire. I do high density planting and will work on higher density when i no longer work 50+h/week. And what tastes better than fresh from the garden food?

  3. #13
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    I kept trying to learn crochet and knitting and was not getting it, however it didn't click for the longest time. Then when it clicked I was totally hooked (hahaha).

    What keeps me going is that I can be very freeform, crochet is more forgiving than knitting. It is also more adaptable to not following strict patterns. I learned to make shapes and then put them together in different ways and create new things (dragon puppets anyone). I can follow a pattern when I want, I am working on a unicorn toy that is so stinkin' cute. I actually paid for the pattern which is important to support an artist. I am actually thinking about writing patterns next.

    I used to do a lot of writing but this is less cerebral and that is good.

  4. #14
    Senior Member jp1's Avatar
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    So many gardeners and sewers/knitters/etc. I suppose that's not surprising since these activities lead to tangible results that can be pleasing if done well. My SIL has had various hobbies of these types and I love the gifts we've received that were the result of them. (she's a serial hobbyist, spending maybe two years on a given hobby before moving on to try a new one.) The only hobby I've had that ever involved the creation of anything was beer brewing. For almost 10 years I actively did it. It's probably not hard to figure out why I got into it...

    My longest lasting hobby is reading books. I've been a voracious reader pretty much my entire life. I got my first library card when I was maybe 7 and can't imagine life without one.

    The only other hobby I've put much effort into is bike riding. Like beer brewing this is also a past hobby, not a current one. I always considered it a hobby more than an exercise regimen because the point of it wasn't physical fitness (although that was a nice side benefit). The point was exploring new places to see what I could see. I started in Jr. High School as a way to get out of the house and see what the rest of the city I grew up in looked like, and that carried with me to every place I lived afterwards. Now that hobby has been replaced with walking. Over the past year I've been obsessed with a book called Stairway Walks of San Francisco (which I found at the library of course...) Following the suggested routes in the book I've managed to do obscure meandering walks through little known places all over the city. I've done maybe 20 of the 31 walks in it at least once and will probably have finished all of them before rainy season starts again this fall.

  5. #15
    Senior Member flowerseverywhere's Avatar
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    B9634D0F-ABE0-46D6-AEFE-3AFF0C8BE667.jpegMy love of quilting is an obsession. I am making historical quilts now. This is Farmers wife completed this year. Also doing Dear Jane. I started in 1978 making a quilt for my newborn baby and have not stopped

    E79F6CC7-C3CC-4618-BECD-03735FC0F951.jpgAfrican violets, my other obsession. Living in Florida I have extensive outdoor flowers year around and a large rack of fun and unique violets I grow and swap with friends. Just for the fun of it.

  6. #16
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    Flowers: Your Dear Jane is FABULOUS

  7. #17
    Senior Member catherine's Avatar
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    Thanks for all your replies! It's very interesting to hear everyone's interests, and how they started. Also, thanks for sharing pics, flowerseverywhere! I really admire quilters.

    As for me, I've had several hobbies over the years. I started out in the "art hobby" camp. My father was an amateur artist, so I took his lead and did a lot of drawing back when I was really young. Like UL, I really like it for its meditative qualities. I also did oil painting. Never liked watercolors or pastels, though.

    In high school, my great aunt taught me how to sew and I made all my school clothes. When I got into theatre (that was my next hobby), I took my love of sewing there and made costumes. At one point I thought about becoming a costume designer as a career--and I applied to Emerson College in Boston because they had a degree in it. But I took another path. I was also active at that time in community theatre groups.

    I took a long hobby hiatus while working & raising kids. But I'm slowly returning to them, although different ones. I draw a little bit. I don't sew anymore. I gave up being on the stage ages ago. These days my hobbies are:

    Geneology: When Ancestry.com came out, my son gave me the software as a Christmas gift, and I found it so much fun to research and record my family history. Of course, I went online with it when it became available I still am dabbling in it, and adding photos and documents as I come across them. I've been able to trace some branches of my family back to the days of William the Conqueror.

    Permaculture: I was pulled like a magnet to permaculture in 2009/2010, when I saw a course listing for Permaculture Design Certificates in a catalog I get from a New York center for holistic studies. I subscribe to their catalogs, so every year for 3 years, I saw the same listing, and then I couldn't fight the urge anymore. I finally bit the bullet. It was expensive, but I decided that I really wanted to take the 11-week course. (BTW, I just came across the best definition for permaculture I've seen: Permaculture is a system of agricultural and social design principles centered around simulating or directly utilizing the patterns and features observed in natural ecosystems.). I still love practicing and learning about permaculture, and the main reason I took the Master Gardener class this year was simply to give me a chance to expand on that aspect of permaculture--to get my hands in the dirt so to speak. I think following permaculture principles will be essential in the future in order to manage the stressors we've placed on the planet.

    Reading: Like jp1 (and I know a lot of other people on this forum), I love to read.
    "Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it--every, every minute?" Emily Webb, Our Town
    www.silententry.wordpress.com

  8. #18
    Senior Member SteveinMN's Avatar
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    I've been thinking about this question since it was posted yesterday and two things came to mind: one, that I have had a lot of hobbies; and two, I don't know how so many of the interests I've been exposed to became hobbies.

    I've enjoyed photography for decades. My grandfather was a serious hobbyist photographer, but I don't think that's why I picked up the hobby (since all of us kids groaned when my grandfather had to fiddle with his completely-manual camera to take pictures and we didn't think we looked like the results). I've long enjoyed listening to music, but I suspect that's because my brother got all the musical talent in the family and I couldn't learn to play anything despite several attempts. I learned how to cook from my mom, who considered basic cooking (hamburgers, omelets, etc.) a necessary life skill; I enjoyed it enough to become really good at it, though, so I guess the spark was supplied and I went from there. I suppose at this point I would consider square dancing a hobby but I can't remember why I became interested enough in it 20-25 years ago to take lessons.

    So I suppose the answer remains a mystery to me....
    Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome. - Booker T. Washington

  9. #19
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    I’m on a multi year adventure watching all of the Star Trek canon in historical order. I’m loving it. 🖖🏼

  10. #20
    Moderator Float On's Avatar
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    Kayaking came rather natural. I've always been drawn to any moving water. Though we live on two lakes my husband has no interest in buying a boat. A few kayaks was my answer and I don't invite him along (well to be honest with his back he couldn't get in one anyway).
    Gardening came about because of rocks. I love rocks and our glade has a plenty! Birding came about because of my son's interest.
    There are a lot of other things I do but don't consider them hobbies like knitting (picked it up because women at church wanted a group and a group needs a sponsor) or sewing (old skill passed down from mom and 4H) or glass fusing (it was a business for me as an addition to our blown glass work) or photography (skill I developed to meet a need because I didn't like what national jury photographers were doing).
    Float On: My "Happy Place" is on my little kayak in the coves of Table Rock Lake.

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