Hobbies Need To Be Accessible. I Believe That Its Becoming More And More Important For People To Have

Hobbies need to be accessible. I believe that it’s becoming more and more important for people to have physical hobbies that create real things and develop real skills–giving people a sense of accomplishment and overcoming feelings of helplessness. But so often, it seems like even beginner-level instruction is aimed at making the entry barrier as high as possible.

I was reading this book where this guy argues that people should develop areas of “micromastery” when getting into a hobby. Find one small, achievable, but still impressive task to master, so you have a cool skill to show off (and the sense of accomplishment) without having to master an entire huge area of knowledge. Instead of learning to cook, learn to create a really good omelet. Instead of learning an entire new language, learn to count to ten. And then you have a knowledge base to help you if you want to explore further. Seems very common sense. Very accessible. Learning is for everyone, not just people who want to devote tons of time to a new hobby. But even that guy, in his instructions, keeps telling people to buy the most expensive equipment to have the best possible results. There’s even a point where he says “the more expensive, the better”!

That infuriates me. I am enraged. The guy who’s trying to make learning accessible to the masses is now saying this is the realm only of the rich! It’s telling people to buy into the marketing ploy that more expensive is automatically better! It’s absurd. It’s insane. There probably is equipment that improves the outcome of the final product, but it’s not necessarily the most expensive stuff, and you certainly don’t need the expensive stuff when you’re just starting out!

Yet, tutorials and craft books keep pushing this message. If you want to start drawing, you need an expensive sketch book and seven different pencils and different weights of pen, and the right eraser. If you want to bake, you have to have the best flours and the appropriate sourdough technique. If you want to knit, you better have the expensive yarn. That’s garbage, and it makes things more difficult than they need to be.

When you’re just starting out, you’re learning if you even like the activity. Do I like spending time drawing? Do I even like the process of knitting or woodworking or building model airplanes? It’s pointless to spend tons of money on good yarn only to find that you hate the process of knitting. Pointless to get the good pencils when the process of drawing makes you want to crawl out of your skin.

If you want to try something, just try it! As simply and cheaply as possible. Want to draw? Get a free pencil and a bit of notebook paper. Want to knit? Get a pair of knitting needles from the thrift store and some dollar store yarn. As you get deeper into the hobby, you’ll probably want to upgrade your supplies–but now that you know more about the process, you know what problems can be solved by better supplies.

I was always intimidated by bookbinding–the tutorials always talked about having the right glue and the right book press–until a guy in the comments said, “I use Elmer’s Glue and my laptop.” I could manage that! That was accessible! I got some glue and some big textbooks and made a book! Not perfect, but it wouldn’t have been perfect even if I had the fancy supplies–I was just starting out! And then I figured out that a paper cutter and some kind of tool to smooth the endpapers would be useful. So I got that–as cheaply as possible. I have made books and I have enjoyed it without a huge investment in time and money. And more tutorials need to take that approach. I refuse to believe that we have to give tons of money to the crafting industry. I refuse to believe that we have to be consumers in order to become creators.

if you like crafting and also free things, might i suggest the antique pattern library?

it’s a not for profit that’s gathering books, patterns, and other materials related to crafting that are out of copyright (or getting permission from copyright holders in some cases) in order to share them online. they scan items, clean them up, then make everything available for free!

free things are great, especially when you’re just starting to get into something. like oh, i’m supposed to spend money on this hobby i just picked up 20 minutes ago???

the first time i ended up on the site, i seriously spent hours just trawling through everything. there’s the usual suspects like knitting, crochet, embroidery, but there’s also woodwork, calligraphy, and books on things like how to mount and frame pictures. with cross stitch patterns, they also make modern charts with the dmc colour codes available.

links to their webbed site and instagram:

https://www.antiquepatternlibrary.org/

https://www.instagram.com/theantiquepatternlibrary/

behold, a glorious cat cross stitch pattern (link goes to antique pattern library page):

[image id: Multicolour charted cross stitch design of a cat sitting on a red pillow with tassels, holding a green ball]

VERKA SERDUCHKA MY BELOVED

spotted in a pub in continental Europe

[“For lesbian feminists, liking women also meant liking the whole woman, or the less coercively modified woman. Accounts of this expansive lust for women can be found in lesbian feminist memoirs, in which body fat, cancer scars, power exchange, disability, aging, radical activism, self-love, years of sexual experience deemed “slutty” in the straight world, and various forms of embodied “ridiculousness” are all fodder for lesbian feminist arousal. I offer a few examples:

Audre Lorde, in Zami, reverently describes Ginger, her first lover, as “gorgeously fat, with an open knowledge about her body’s movement that was delicate and precise. . . . She had pads of firm fat upon her thighs, and round dimpled knees. . . . Loving Ginger that night was like coming home to a joy I was meant for.” Lorde later describes her lust for a different woman, Eudora, whose “pale keloids of radiation burn” were part of her irresistible body: “If I did not put my mouth upon hers and inhale the spicy smell of her breath my lungs would burst. . . . I looked from her round firm breast with its rosy nipple to her scarred chest. . . . I bent and kissed her softly upon the scar. . . . The pleasure of our night flushed over me like sun on the walls.” By contrast, Lorde describes sex with men in terms similar to those used by many feminist straight women of her generation; sex with men was “pretty dismal and frightening and a little demeaning.”

Dorothy Allison, illuminating her gleeful dis/identification with the phallus, recounts her pleasure in “fucking, fucking, fucking” Alix, a woman who wore a dildo named “Bubba,” a cock “fat and bent”: “[It] jiggles obscenely when she walks around the room. Obscene and ridiculous, still no less effective when she puts it between my legs.” Allison goes on to detail the shifting power dynamics between her and Alix, evoking her erotic identification with the vilified old woman, the crone: “She is ten years younger than me . . . sometimes. Sometimes I am eight and she is not born yet, but the ghost of her puts a hand on my throat, pinches my clit, bites my breast. . . . When I am fucking her, I am a thousand years old, a crone with teeth. . . . She is a suckling infant, soft in my hands, trusting me with her tender open places.”

Highlighting the lesbian feminist disinvestment in female sexual innocence and modesty, Jeanne Cordova recalls that her status as a handsome butch lesbian and high-profile radical organizer “brought dozens of women” to her bed, one of whom, Bejo, Cordova describes as “the most accomplished femme lover” she’d ever met. “Old-school bar femmes were far better lovers than newly coined lesbian feminists.”

Cherríe Moraga, too, desires a woman with age, accomplishment. Of Elena, the woman she lusts for, Moraga states, “I am ready for you now. I want age. Knowledge. Your body that still, after years, withholds and surrenders—keeps me there, waiting, wishing. . . . Willing. Willing to feel this time what disrupts in me. Girl. Woman. Child. Boy. Willing to embody what I will in the space of her arms.”

Lesbian feminist desire, in these accounts, is defined not purely by two women’s sexual attraction to each other but by a quality of desiring women in which the objects of one’s lust are women’s complexities and accomplishments, both corporeal and otherwise. The best women lovers have the scars, the hunger, the weight, the teeth, and the political and sexual experience that allows them to know and harness their erotic will. Through Lorde’s desiring gaze, physical features that are often cast as deeroticizing imperfections in the straight world are remade into sites of pleasure. In Allison’s writing, sex with women is transformative and dead serious in its intensity, but it is also an inevitable send-up to the phallocentric self-seriousness of heteronormativity. In Cordova’s retelling of her life story, there is no erotic without the movement, the revolution, and the battle scars and street cred earned by women at its helm. In Moraga’s account, her lust is shot through with desire for the fruits of her lover’s lived experience. I dare say that this way of loving women, this understanding of the erotic, need not be owned by lesbians but is among the basic requirements of deep heterosexuality, wherein men’s lust for women is triggered by women’s actual temperaments, bodies, and experiences. Men’s sense of being sexually orientated toward women must signal, as it does for most lesbians, an acute interest and investment in women’s lives and accomplishments because, within deep heterosexuality, attraction is measly and half-baked if it is not a synthesis of lust and humanization. From this viewpoint, the hyperstraight man possesses an unstoppable interest not only in women’s bodies but also in women’s collective freedom. To be into women, one must be for women.”]

Jane Ward, The Tragedy of Heterosexuality

STOP VOTING FOR SWEDEN DAMN IT