What?

When I was five, I made a purse.  That sucker was hideous, but I made it. Sometime around that same age, my mom taught me to make “broomstick lace” by crocheting onto a broom handle.  And yeah, we used a real broom handle.  We were thrifty in those days.  Sure wish that idea had rooted deeper.

I digress.  Broomstick lace. I don’t know how many actual rows I did, but I do recall at about age eight, I graduated to granny squares.  Hated those suckers. I thought they were ugly.  Crochet as a hobby?  Fail.  Didn’t enjoy.

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I liked coloring.  I did.  Every time I went to Grandma’s house, I’d walk down to the Skaggs on 7th and Osborn in Phoenix and buy a coloring book and a box of 64 crayons. Colored for hours. Who knew that years later, this would be a skill I’d need? Not me!

But sometime around 1981, when I was eleven, I reread all of the Nancy Drew books.  Yes. ALL of them. Every one they had out then. For the record, I didn’t like the very latest ones.  You could tell they were written by a different person, and Stratemeyer really blew it with whoever they got to do it after about book 28-30. But I fell in love with Nancy Drew’s clothes.  those late ’50s, early ’60s styles appealed to me.  I wanted them.

So I learned to sew.

Yep, hobby #1 is sewing. By the time I was thirteen, I made almost all my clothes. By fifteen, I loved sewing so much that I actually hand-sewed all my clothes (except my school uniforms) since we didn’t have electricity. In fact, I hand-sewed my graduation dress!  Then the satin started fraying, so I ended up having to zig-zag it on a friend’s mom’s sewing machine so it wouldn’t fall apart on me during graduation  How embarrassing!

That sewing bug never went away. In fact, fellow author Cathe Swanson (go over and enter her giveaway!) and I used to create custom boutique outfits and sold them on eBay a decade and a half ago!  Just today, #7 daughter found the bag of fabric we purchased for her Easter dress last year.  Note the word “fabric”.  Yeah.  It didn’t get made.  So, I’m going to do it this year.  I already promised to cut out the dress on March 22.  So… do hold me to that!

Is Sewing My Only Hobby?

Not hardly.  In the years since I’ve been married (almost 30 of those suckers), in my life I’ve…

• knitted
• quilted
• smocked (this is not the same as SMOKED)
• embroidered
• decorative painted (signs and wood furniture)
• made porcelain dolls
• made rag dolls
• beaded
• remade dolls (love turning Bratz dolls into CUTE ones–gotta finish those…)
• digital and paper scrapbooked
• paper crafted (primarily cardmaking)

These days, if I have a few minutes of free time OR if I need a different outlet to wake up my creative synapses, I’m most likely to turn to card making.

But even that tends to head into my books sometimes.  Like this one I did a couple of years ago!

Read that word up there at the top?  Yep, it’s a WYNNEWOOD stamp!  I also have dragon stamps like that one down there in the corner.  EEEP!  (Not all my cards look like they were chewed up and spit out by a dragon.  I just thought this one should).

But only one “hobby” has made it through all the years of my life.

Reading

I value it more today than I ever did.  As a kid, I inhaled words. As a new mom, I escaped the clamor of dirty dishes and floors by reading how to be a better wife and mom.  Yeah.  The irony did not escape me–not even then.

I’m a FAST reader.  Always have been. I used to take home two brown paper bags FULL of books from the library and bring them back a week later.  During the school year.  I read a lot.  I read fast.  And I don’t even want to THINK about how much GARBAGE I read.  And, there’s a bit of non-irony in the fact that  spent a lot of time reading about different hobbies…

These days, I don’t get to read much. In fact, it’s why I joined the CelebrateLit blogging team (watch for a review on Monday.  Amish fiction… in the eighteenth century!).  Because I knew it would FORCE me not only to read more but also to branch out and see what new authors are coming up.  I tend to stick with tried and true authors, and you miss a lot of GREAT stuff that way.

So there they are—my hobbies

I doubt I’ll make it to eighty without adding a few new ones and others becoming less prominent in my life, but then again, I’m becoming rather set in my ways.  So who knows?

This week’s blog post from #MFRWAuthor was all about my hobbies when I’m not writing.  And there you have it.  But I’m curious about you?  What are your hobbies?  Is there something I should add?  And who wants to take guesses on how many I’ve left out?  *blush*

Oh, and PSST!  Don’t forget to enter the drawing for the Ultimate Reader’s Valentine’s Gift Box. The giveaway ends TONIGHT!  So go on over to the BLOG post and get that entry in!