Interests and hobbies are the spice of life. Learning new things keeps us engaged, maintains brain activity and reinvigorates our appreciation for living. If you’ve been tinkering around with finding a new hobby to express your inner artist, please consider our list of unusual and odd craft hobbies for adults.
If you opt out of the ones listed, perhaps it will give you the impetus to discover something else on your own. All of these suggestions any adult can enjoy but there are millions more waiting for discovery.
Ancient Writing & Languages
In our busy world of communication, high tech and constant progress, we forget about the cultures that came before us. When you learn about how other cultures spoke and wrote, it can enrich your understanding of English in general and the etymology, or study of, the roots behind the words we use today.
Having a hobby where you recreate ancient words and lost languages, either on paper or in speech, can be a riveting and fascinating endeavor. It not only puts you on a path to understanding the progression of history, it connects you to ancestors and long-lost lands.
This can be a wonderful escape from stress and tension while broadening your horizons and increasing mental capacities.
Blacksmith Crafting
Make your own furniture, jewelry, cooking utensils, tools and other household implements and décor by smelting or own iron or steel. This hobby has many practical and ornamental uses that can double as a stress reliever and triples as a means of physical exercise.
Smashing a hammer to bend hot metal into shapes, forms and baubles can be a rewarding and fulfilling experience. Although a bit expensive to start, it ends up paying for itself down the road with all the endless possibilities for creation.
It allows you to work with your hands and burn off excess energy in a healthy and productive way while creating works of art for your home.
One-Stroke Painting
One-stroke painting is an unusual and beautiful decorative-type craft that requires a single movement of a paint brush. It originally comes to us from Japan and their traditional painting called, “Hitofude-ryu.” Here, artists paint an entire dragon with only one paint stroke.
But this has traveled into Western culture and developed by artists to incorporate two acrylic paints on one brush. This creates a single stroke with a gradient, giving a blended look between the colors.
The idea is to hold the stroke as long as possible before having to lift the brush from the paper. You can create things like flowers, leaves, trees, ribbons, faces and etc. This not only applies to canvas-style painting, but also to finger nail art.
Sean-Nós Singing
If you’ve ever heard “Nothing Compares to You” by Sinead O’Connor or “Zombie” by Delores O’Riordan of The Cranberries, they have a strange yet beautiful way of singing.
This is a specific use of a type of Irish vocal style called “sean-nós.” Sean-nós is a specialized, ornamental kind of singing, often not accompanied with instruments, although modern adaptations do include music.
Although simple, it is complex in its execution with stylized melodies adorned by quick and sharp crescendos and decrescendos. Sean-Nós is notorious for its high-pitched range, nasalizations, brief pauses, glottal stops and long, extended phrases.
As difficult as it may seem to do, with a little patience and practice, anyone can do it with enough discipline and dedication.
Soap Carving
This hobby is clean, good fun for adults as well as children. It’s inexpensive but very inspiring because soap is a wonderful medium that can acts as a stepping stone to more advanced carving mediums, like wood and stone.
It’s fun, creative and you can do whatever your inner artist comes up with to attempt to make. What’s great about soap is that you can use any bar of soap and anything can be a carving tool to shape and mold it into whatever you want. You can even use popsicle sticks.
You can attempt classic sculptures, animals, flowers or even landscapes. But don’t limit yourself to these ideas, come up with your own. In the event it doesn’t turn into the next Venus de Milo, you can still use the soap for cleaning hands, face and body.
Honorable Mentions
There’s a huge world of rare and remarkable craft hobbies to sink your hands into. If these suggestions don’t suit your fancy, you can always do your own exploration based on your tastes, preferences and interests.
For instance, if you like Native American art, you can do seed beading or Navajo blanket weaving. Likewise, if you have an interest in Russian culture, you could learn how to make Matryoshka dolls. Here are some other honorable mentions for you to ponder and consider:
- String Art was a popular hobby in the 1970s, you hammer nails in a pattern onto a board covered in black cloth (like velvet). You then take colored embroidery floss and wrap it around each of the nails to come up with breathtaking designs and patterns.
- Food Sculpture is a growing and evolving art that turns basic fruits and vegetables into other kinds of shapes and forms using paring knives and other simple kitchen utensils. For instance, you can turn an apple into a rose or carve a carrot into an intricate lattice pattern.
- Origami is a Japanese art where you fold colored construction paper into various shapes and forms. It’s complex style demands a sort of intricacy and attention to detail. But you can create things like animals, boats, airplanes and plants.
Craft Hobbies Are Important
Having a hobby outside the norm is a wonderful way to deal with daily tensions and stress. It gives a creative outlet and offers a mental release. Even if your hobby is challenging and you may not be the next Michael Angelo, the enjoyment of it bring a pleasure and relaxation through satisfaction in knowing you created a work of art yourself.
