We’re bringing that energy back.
As you get older, the pressure to be good at what you do can get in the way of enjoying it — or trying something new altogether. But cooler weather is the perfect excuse to pick up an indoor hobby, regardless of whether you have any talent for it. And if you suck at it, who cares? You’re inside. No one has to know.
So, here are a few ways to put your hands to work and your talents (if any) to the test. A little arts, a little crafts, and absolutely no obligation to make something worth looking at. Then again, you might surprise yourself. There’s only one way to find out!
Junk Journaling
If you have a bunch of crumpled-up receipts at the bottom of your purse, boy, do we have the hobby for you! A junk journal is both a scrapbook and diary, made out of all the stuff you’d normally throw away. It requires little effort, as all you have to do is gather junk and glue it to a page. Gather and glue. That’s it.
Over time, it becomes a record of all the garbage—ahem, little moments that make up your life, important or otherwise. It’s surprisingly difficult to make a "bad" junk journal. The result is usually effortlessly cool but also pretty special.
What’s more, you get a constant little hobby of collecting! Even when you can’t sit on your couch with a glue stick, you can still be working on it. That basically makes you a full-time artist, right?
Painting
Okay, hear us out. Painting might seem like one of the most intimidating art forms to pick up, but it’s actually surprisingly forgiving.
There’s this idea that, once paint hits a surface, you’ve made an irreversible artistic decision. Not really. We recommend starting with a canvas, because if you mess up while the paint is still fresh, a baby wipe or Q-tip can usually take it right back off the smooth surface. If that doesn’t work — or you’re painting on paper — let the mistake dry and paint over it. If you crash out halfway through and decide you hate everything you’ve done, cover the whole thing in white and start over. And if a blank canvas still feels a little too serious? Paint a rock. There are always more rocks.
Just don’t make your first project a realistic portrait of someone you love. That is perhaps the only mistake in art. Other than that, don’t worry too much about whether you can paint. Start with whether you want to, and the rest is quite negotiable.
Air-Dry Clay
If pottery feels a little too ambitious, air-dry clay is pottery’s much less demanding cousin. Though, if your jewelry dish comes out extremely lopsided, we can’t promise you won’t start looking up kilns.
Part of what makes this craft so satisfying is that you can actually end up with something useful(ish), like the aforementioned lopsided jewelry dish, a pot for your plant, or a tiny figurine whose only purpose is to make you smile. The only thing air-dry clay really demands is a willingness to accept that symmetry may not be in the cards.
That’s kind of the charm, though. Clay creations look good with a little wobble to them. Our favorite use might be turning mini sculptures into magnets. Make a little fruit, flower, animal, or whatever else you can manage, stick a magnet on the back, and suddenly you’re right back to those elementary school art-on-the-fridge days.
Decorating Thrifts
This is your opportunity to make the kind of home decor no reasonable corporation would manufacture. Thrift stores are a good place to start because you can find plenty of plain objects with good bones for a few dollars, which makes experimenting feel a lot less precious.
Find something you like almost enough — a picture frame, little tray, mirror, vase, whatever — and fix the almost. Paint it, decoupage it, cover it in rhinestones, add some stamps, or find a whole new purpose for the object altogether. The whole point here is personalization, so maybe the real project is figuring out what that actually looks like for you.
Maybe you’ll discover yourself in the process. Otherwise, the object goes back to the thrift store and the cycle begins anew.
The best-case scenario is that you uncover some hidden talent. The other best-case scenario is that you make something weird and love it anyway. And the other, other best-case scenario? You let go a little.
Life comes with plenty of opportunities to be judged on your performance, and your hobbies really shouldn’t be among them. With so few situations left where you can achieve something with a glue stick, we should take advantage of the ones that remain!
