Handicrafts You Can Learn in Just a Couple of Weeks
Everyone seems to be so busy these days that it can be tricky to find the time for the things we enjoy. Our busy work schedules and packed out personal lives make it so much harder to find a quiet moment to enjoy something that is just for us. Some people love to draw or paint, others will create sculptures or earthenware with clay. These are all fantastically rewarding hobbies and professions, but they can take years to master and can cost thousands of pounds to pursue.
As we are so time and resource poor in this day and age it can be nearly impossible to find the time and budget to put towards the hobbies we dream of taking up. We may not have weeks and hundreds of pounds to spend on night school to learn pottery making and firing, or the months and years it can take to perfect your portraiture.
If you have a creative spirit but have struggled to find the time for many creative hobbies and pursuits then the best thing to do is to choose something that you can pick up much more quickly. You should also think about choosing something that you can dip in and out of and work on when you have the time without the project being ruined as a work of clay would be if you left it for weeks and tried to come back to finish it much later.
Crochet
If you like the idea of knitting but want to try something similar that is a bit more portable and quicker to pick up then crochet is the answer. Rather than using two knitting needles to work yarn, crochet uses a single hook and a specific pattern of yarning over and pulling up loops to create a fabric from a strand of yarn. Simple stitches are easy to learn, perhaps the hardest things to grasp when learning crochet are how to properly hold the yarn and how to keep your tension even.
Embellishing
Rather than making entire projects from scratch, you can instead learn to upgrade things you already have or have bought to improve them and add personalisation. There are many ways you can embellish things like garments and homewares but it all depends on what you want to achieve and what is available at your local or online haberdashery store. Beading is a good skill to learn, as is embroidery, and you can even learn to add trims and some small alterations.
Flower pressing
Many of us will remember picking and pressing flowers as children, but this can also be a fun hobby for adults too. Rather than pressing your flowers in a heavy book like you may have done back in the day, buy a proper flower press. They are not expensive but will give you better results. Once you have gotten the hang of pressing your flowers you can find fun and creative ways to use them. You can incorporate pressed flowers into many different kinds of projects such as artworks, bookmarks and illustrations.
Doodling
You might think that doodling is an absentminded activity that is not necessarily meant to produce something aesthetically pleasing, but this could not be further from the truth. Load up YouTube and search for doodling videos and you will see exactly what we mean! Doodling is a perfectly valid and often abstract form of art that can also be highly therapeutic. At first you might not be able to produce doodles that you think look good, but with just a bit of practice here and there when you have a spare five or so minutes to get ink on paper you will quickly learn how to control your nib to create fascinating designs.
Bonsai shaping
Caring for bonsai can be a lot of work but luckily you can break the tasks required for their care into bite size chunks of five or so minutes here and there. There is a lot of tradition involved in training and shaping a bonsai tree but there is also plenty of scope to get creative and do something completely different. The most important and time consuming part of looking after bonsai is to do lots of research and choose your species carefully.