Ugh! I think I am a dabbler. I have so many raw materials and books to do with hobbies and crafts that sit on the shelves, taking up space and causing me ‘head space’ grief. It feels like I have so many things ‘undone’. I am a great ‘dreamer’ but not such a good ‘doer’. My perfectionist tendencies seem to censor my creative spirit and I then move to the next interesting thing because my creation is not ‘perfect’.
Sometimes I think that if I could just let go of the crap, my life would feel lighter. But, the thought of getting rid of it is unsettling. I might change my mind and actually engage in the hobby or craft.
For example, I have had that darn FIMO clay for so long, I am sure it is no longer useful. My books about beading and the millions of beads are just waiting to be made up into jewellery. For awhile I wanted to be a jewellery designer. But you know? I don’t even really WEAR jewellery!
Then I had an idea for an educational toy and created it, made a website, and never really sold the toys. I had hopes of becoming a toymaker. And get this….I don’t even have children! Then there are all the philosophy books with tons of great ideas and I don’t even have a friend to discuss these wonderful works with.
There are other endeavours as well, but I am sure you get the idea. It is not at all about hoarding or cluttering. Everything is relatively organized and tidy. It just sits there gathering dust. I am surrounded by what I feel are my ‘failures’. Sometimes I think if everything were ruined by an accidental, non-life-threatening flood that the decision would be made for me. The stuff would be ruined beyond repair and that would be that. I am not even sure I would miss it. But, I still can’t bring myself to willingly, voluntarily get rid of it. Just in case…
How about you? Any dabblers out there? How did you kick the habit?
I find some one who is thinking about taking up a hobby, and “help” them get started. Friends, children of friends, neighbors, SDMBers, whomever is silly enough to express an interest in learning needlepoint/embossing/those cement stepping stone things/glass etching/beading/whatever in my hearing.
All my stuff is well organized, so looking for a box usually takes longer than getting the “donation” together. For a few bucks postage, I get rid of some unused stuff, and someone else learns something that makes them happy. Win-win. Until my next wild hair hobby hits, anyway.
I’m a dabbler, too, but I have no desire to get rid of the stuff because I like having it around, just in case. What usually happens is a couple of my friends come over and we have a craft night - whip out the origami or the paints or beads and go to town. It’s a lot of fun and the stuff gets used up faster since there’s three or four of us working on it at once. Of course, the squabbles over who gets the last extra fancy bead or who used up all the red paint can be epic.
AB, I have so been you. You also remind me of my sister, who is so immensely talented but can’t quite settle on a medium. I’m almost 50, and I have dabbled forever. Then it happened. I found my medium. It happened to me. It can happen to you.
Among the things I discovered were important to me was being able to move in and out of it. I can put it down and don’t have to worry about brushes drying out, etc. I don’t have to sequester myself in inadequate, makeshift “studio” space to do it.
The “perfection” thing is hard to overcome. My totally free-form medium enables me to side-step that issue entirely.
My point is that maybe you just haven’t found the right medium yet. But even if you haven’t…
IMNA psychologist (nor do I play one on television), but I recommend that you stop going on a guilt trip about having the stuff and not using it. Is anyone hurt by you having it? Are your children or pets or spouse going hungry because you buy craft supplies? Is your life in danger because you’ve hoarded enough stuff to create a fire hazard?
No.
My mom was a dabbler. The cool thing as a kid was that there were endless, interesting art supplies to play with – and that’s what got me where I am today with my own art.
ppgrl’s craft night suggestion is great!
On a practical level, getting rid of stuff doesn’t have to be all or nothing. FIMO is cheap. Throw your old FIMO away. If you decide you want to get back into it, buy some new. You’ll spend $5.
My most recent craft book/magazine purchases include beading, carpentry (mostly making shelves), Japanese Shoji, concrete sculpture, mosaic, paper lampshades, a couple other mixed media books for garden art and lanterns, composting, hydroponics and Danish cooking (for the Aebleskiver recipes). Those amazon like-new used books really add up. I have many more books that aren’t recent purchases, that include origami, paper mache, sewing and other stuff.
I have also recently purchases the following craft materials, some molds for making concrete or plaster stepping stones and coasters (to mosaic on), some glass chips for mosaic, mosaic grout and adhesive, tile cutters, decorative pebbles and some clay. At least most of that stuff all has to do with the one hobby, mosaics. Not so recent purchases include beading and jewelry making stuff. I’m always buying yarn even though I don’t knit that much but when I see it on sale I buy it.
I also have some incomplete projects hanging around, those are mostly paper mache sculptures. And the other day I cleaned out my closet and found my portfolio of sketches, several of which are unfinished. I have problems with sketching, I can only do it when I am in the right mood and I can really only sketch from a picture or photo, although I have been able to do some still life type stuff on rare occasions. I sketch birds best because I studied a lot of bird anatomy, animals second and humans not very well. I do much better at 3 dimensional art, like sculpture. It may not always turn out looking like I had pictured in my head but it turns out better than my sketches if I am not in the right mood. I am also knitting something just for the hell of it, it will probably just end up a blanket for the cats.
I haven’t been able to stop or give it up and I don’t want to because I have a lot of ideas and I still hope to get to some of them some day. I’d do better though if I could get my house organized so I had an area set aside to work in. And I may be slightly worse because not only do I collect all the craft books and materials but I save all sorts of other things that people would consider trash in order to use it in my projects. Glass bottles, cardboard, cardboard tubes, styrofoam, wire coat hangers (for armatures) and other odds and ends.
I realize that anyone coming into my home will think I’m a freak. I stopped caring long ago and just don’t have people in my home.
I thought enameling looked cool so I got 2 Hi-Temp kilns and then discovered what a pain it was to wash the enamels. Hours and hours. I did it but then got distracted before I actually enameled anything.
I have boxes of clay in the garage that dried out years ago, the clay kiln is holding up one end of the work bench, and the kick wheel is buried under a sea of old magazines.
On the jewelry front, I taught myself to hammer a tiny leaf out of silver and it looked beautiful. Then I realised I only had about twenty more to go. It and the tools are laying on the floor in the family room. Its been two years.
I also came up with an idea but for a water cooler thing. I made it, filed for a patent and all kinds of stuff. I don’t have a water cooler! I think the invention thing is in the attic.
The enjoyment of just thinking of getting into different things is part of the richness of life. Don’t get rid of it and don’t think of it as failures. Its just not success’ yet. We don’t want to be hasty.
As far as friends, you’ve got plenty here. Philosophise away.
I love to dabble. I have decided that for me it is more in the learning about how to do something more than becoming an expert at it.
How do people knit? took about a month to figure it out, made a few scarfs and a sweater and decided, ok I got the basics on this. what’s next.
Brewing beer sounds neat, how do you do that? I still play with that, but only 1 or 2 batches a year.
Oil painting - never got the hang of that one. (or painting in general).
Can I make a bird house? yep - got lots of tools to prove it. Mine might not be the best looking, but I understand biscuits, dove joints, etc.
I like Jelly, wonder if I could grow some strawberries and make my own. As it turns out I can. Got a couple books on gardening and canning to prove it.
My wife is worried right now because i’m talking about honey. How hard can it be to become an apiarist (that’s a beekeeper to you and me)…
I love this answer. I just now realized that it’s that way for me. I like to learn new things, once learned it’s onto something else. I do sometimes go back to old things which is why I keep so much stuff around the house. I can afford it so I stopped worrying about the expense a long time ago. I’ve got canning supplies galore, fancy cake pans, icing tips, candy molds, a glass carboy and corker from wine-making (dandelion, picked 'em out of my own backyard), ceramic paints, enamels, macrame twine, beads, latch hook stuff, tons of art papers, brushes, fabric scraps, decoupage gear, a pile of little popping caps from making my own holiday crackers…goodness knows what else. Oh, yeah, several exacto knives and paper cutting tools from my latest foray into paper models and automata.
I’m thinking maybe precious metal clay next…
What fun is life if you’re not learning new things? Besides, it’s what I am.
Wow, you sound exactly like my girlfriend. Just this month I got her a pottery wheel and all the fixins because she’s shown interest. I almost lined the wheel up next to the camera/darkroom, candle-making supplies, soap making crap, and bead jewelry stuff I’ve bought her over the years. All of it virtually untouched after the first use or two. I’ve signed her up for pottery classes, maybe that will help this one stick.
Here’s the problem. I’m an avid fly fisherman, fly tyer and rod builder. I spend almost every single waking hour fishing, preparing to fish or scheming a way to ditch whatever I’m doing to get onto a stream. I think she sees my passion, and friends’ passions for their own thing, and wishes she had the same.
I think there is an OCD aspect to being passionate about things. She doesn’t seem to have it. I would guess she doesn’t need it either. If one doesn’t have a propensity towards obsession, obsession isn’t what they need in order to feel whole. Without occasionally standing in water waving a stick, I have no idea how to deal with the rest of the world. It’s my constant that I view everything else through.
To those who aren’t this way it seems beautiful and desirable to have such a lopsided dedication. In reality, I suppose it’s a byproduct of dysfunction.
Maybe it’s not a character flaw that you’re dealing with, rather, a lack of one.
You guys are awesome! What a talented, creative bunch you are.
Some of the hobbies and crafts you describe are ones I have wanted to try. I once took lampworking lessons and loved it, but the studio was over an hours drive from my house and it seemed easy enough to set up a studio a bit closer to home. I tried to talk my (at the time) fiancé into consenting to getting a lampworking studio set up, complete with the gas tanks, blow torch, and kiln to anneal the hand-made beads, but for some reason he did not feel this was ‘doable’. Maybe the fact we were in an 800 square foot apartment had something to do with it. But, it seemed entirely possible to me.
It is true, I feel I am looking for my ‘gift’ and am so very afraid I might not ever find it. There are just so many fun and interesting things out there that I would love to try. I have always wanted to try beekeeping and making stained glass panels. I want to learn to spin and knit with the yarn I make. Cooking has been something I have been working on and love it, although I am not very good and my creations sometimes fall short of my expectations. I have been writing haiku and working on some sonnets, but this sort of creativeness does required a certain frame of mind for me and lately things have been a bit topsy-turvey, so this might have to be put on the shelf for awhile.
Letting go of the guilt as someone upthread suggested will be hard as I wonder what else I could have done with the money I spent on the supplies, like travel to interesting places. But, I don’t think that the money is really the issue as I earn a good living and have the discretionary income to dabble. Maybe I need to view it not as failure, but as opportunities of discovery of what my gift is not. Maybe it is part of what being a sagittarius is all about- one who is open to learning and an expansive thinker.
I think the real issue is wondering what my gift is or if I even have one. I hope I find it because I am so afraid I will go through life without ever discovering it. Why, just last week, I thought about taking up the harp and asked my husband how much did he think one would cost…
That’s so me. I have a million zillion uncompleted cross stitch projects. I own several planes but no finished pieces of woodworking. I have just started playing the guitar and we all know how that’s going to turn out. Ditto polymer clay, electronics, etc.
I am so glad you started this thread it makes me feel better. Frankly, sometimes when I get all caught up in learning some new hobby I feel a little manic. I go through periods of coming up with all sorts of ideas and I must write them down. This is why I have 3 notebooks for ideas, a small one in my purse, another one I keep at my desk and another one on a clipboard that I take from room to room with me for when I think of things at bedtime.
There was a recent thread where people posted their recent craft projects and I felt bad because I didn’t have anything completed I wanted to post. Maybe we could start a support group for us Unfinishers and encourage each other to finish something?
An online friend of mine started a blog for craft projects and figured she’d be posting all sorts of unfinished stuff but she keeps finishing things and making me feel worse. I promised myself that I would finish some projects this year and post an instructable on something, not sure if I can go the blog route though.
Whooo. I’m so like this, but only in a virtual sense. Or non-material sense. Whatever the term should be.
As in, I buy books about crafts and devour them, but never actually buy the materials to do whatever. Because as some point I realize I would enjoy the process but have no actual desire to own the results.
I think knitting and crocheting would be peaceful and soothing…but I find wool irritating and itchy, and what’s the point of hand-made acrylic stuff?
Mosaic making looks very cool, but what would I do with them once I finished?
Pottery looks cool, but I already have cabinets and shelves overflowing with vases and serving dishes and what all.
The one itch I can’t seem to shake is to try out those polymer clays. Though, again, I’m not sure what I’d make.
I’ve dabbled in painting, woodworking, cross-stitch, wood burning, polymer clay, knitting, and a wide variety of paper crafts (cards, altererd books, scrapbooks).
I’m also involved in activities that keep me busy most evenings out of the house. I don’t have time to really do any of the hobbies. I can’t abide the thought of buying a card when I have everything to make a much nicer one, but I end up rushing and the ones I make don’t meet my perfectionist sandards so, my hobbies not only don’t relax me, they cause me additional anxiety.
I would be happier if I could just get rid of all the unfinished projects and supplies I know I’ll never use, but I spent good money on those! (yeah, I know. I’m working on it, but that’s what stops me from throwing it all out).
My mom harnessed her dabbling inot one hobby. She builds miniature room boxes sorta like these, but she builds her own boxes. In any one box she does some wood working, and some sewing. She’s cross-stitched rugs, and made tiny braided ones. She’s fashioned things from polymer clay. painted tiny portraits, and taught herself mold making.
Just to confirm my dabbler status, looking for a site with a good example of room boxes caused me to seriously consider how nice an art deco room box I could build. Right after I finish knitting socks, growing orchids, mastering candy making, sew some clothes, learn to salsa dance and… I think you all understand.
Others have covered most of wanted to say so I’ll leave it with them.
The thing I wanted to address is the perfectionism. I abandon a lot of projects because they are not turning out to my expectations. So I decided to make something I have no knowledge in and that I knew could not possibly turn out even close to what I would expect if I had learned anything about it. I knew before I started it would turn out crappy and that is why I decided to do it. To try to break my obsession with the thing being perfect.
So I decided to make a pirate ship out of popcicle sticks. I figured 2-3 weeks and it would be done. Well it’s been about 3 weeks and it is coming along but a lot slower than I thought. I have no knowledge of boat building, or even what pirate ships really look like except for what I have seen in movies, and I am intentionally trying to avoid all such knowledge. I am pretty sure I am going about the building process wrong because I keep having to switch up my plans. I get an idea on how to do something and start adding sticks and then after awhile I can see the currant plan will not work and then it sits for a day or two until I can think up a new plan. It’s like a puzzle that way.
But I figured as long as it floats when I am done then I will be happy with it and put it on the shelf to triumphantly collect dust.
EDIT: Oh yeah and StarvingButStrong I have a silly suggestion to get you going with the clay. Why not make an elephant?
I say we stop looking at our dabbler status as a negative and embrace it as a positive. After all, Da Vinci was a bit of a dabbler, and his stuff often came out far from perfect. We’re in good company, folks.
I’ve tried (in no particular order) pottery, fabric painting, drawing, water & acrylic painting, metalworking, carpentry, furniture restoration, learning guitar and piano, writing poetry and short fiction, knitting, cross-stitch and probably a bunch of others. Some of these resulted in a project or two that I quite liked, but none of them resulted in perfection. I’m okay with that. I learned a lot from trying to play guitar, even if one of the things I failed to learn was, well, how to actually play guitar well.
I quit painting and drawing at a fairly young age (midteens) because I had this sudden epiphany that I would never be ‘perfect,’ that none of the art I’d tried to create ever achieved what I’d envisioned. I really regret that because one of the things I realized after I quit is that I enjoy the process of making something far more than I actually care about the final outcome. And I enjoyed the process of trying out and learning about how to use new mediums far more than I cared about perfecting my techniques with said mediums. I really wish that back then, someone had told me that that was exactly the problem Leonardo had; maybe then I would have been able to relax and enjoy the process without worrying so much about the outcome.
I know that I’m going to keep dabbling, and that it’s pretty unlikely that I’ll ever find that one true craft that suits my unique talents. I’d rather keep learning and trying new stuff than trying to limit myself to just one or two crafts. Things that I want to try in the near future (just as soon as this semester ends, so I actually have time to dabble, dammit) include learning drums and learning how to spin. It no longer bothers me that I have an awful lot of fail sitting around the house collecting dust, because I’m happier with just trying stuff than I am at succeeding.
Wow, I see myself in so many of these replies. I’m so glad I’m not alone!
This hit especially close to home. I wish I could find something that I’m naturally good at, that I have a real knack for. So far, no dice.
Part of my problem is that my perfectionist nature causes me to get frustrated and give up when projects go off the rails. I also have the nagging suspicion that I could do it (whatever it is) if only I had all the stuff for it. So my dress could be perfect, if only I had a dressmaker’s dummy, I could learn to play the harmonica if I had professional lessons, I could learn Spanish if those darn Rosetta Stone lessons weren’t so expensive.
I suppose that when I find a hobby I’m passionate about I’ll persue it regardless of cost or time constraints. For now, I dabble.
But I’m not a Republican.
I think what I might like to make is some ‘charms’ – small things, like flowers or whatever – and use them as dangles on bookmarks.
Then I can give everyone bookmarks and be rid of the final products.
