✨ My Favorite Analog Hobbies (That Are Also Whimsical) ✨

Hello, Folk of the Hollow!

It’s funny, I just realized today that I don’t really talk about my hobbies all that much. I just kind of . . . do them and forget to talk on here about what my hobbies actually are.

In truth, I have a ton of them and I’m not very good at most—but that’s okay! I’m of the mindset that you don’t have to be good at something to enjoy doing it. The important part is that you’re having fun!

Before the last couple of years, I definitely struggled with that idea. I wanted so much to be really good at all of my hobbies right away, and when I wasn’t I stopped trying. But as I got older I realized just how not fun that actually was. Who wants to be that person that doesn’t get to enjoy life just because it doesn’t work out the way they want right away?

These hobbies are, specifically, ones in which I don’t need my phone. Or, if I do need it, it’s simply to have a pattern brought up (which I’ve recently realized I can do on my tablet, and it actually makes reading the pattern easier, so I really don’t need my phone for this one!) and not to scroll on social media or anything. I must sound like a total grandma complaining about social media but I really do think it’s been a huge contributor to the sense of anxiety and depression that I’ve been experiencing over the last several years. Comparison is the enemy of joy and all that.

But we’re here to talk about hobbies, not rant about social media!

So here are some of my favorite analog hobbies to do when I just want to unplug for a while and feel like a fairytale character.

Reading might be kind of an obvious one.

If you read my Whimsical Weekend Morning Routine post, you already know how much I love to read.

Pretty appropriate, actually, since last year my husband gave me the biggest present he’s ever given me in our whole 18+ year relationship: my own library.

That’s right, he pulled a full Beauty and the Beast and built me a library from scratch, combining two of our rooms into one big sanctuary for me to putter around in every day with the things that bring me the most joy!

I have a ton of books stored up here and am always hunting for more, so of course reading is one of my biggest analog hobbies. I count reading on my kindle as an analog hobby as well because there’s no opportunity to doomscroll—especially since I don’t have any social media apps on my tablet at all. In fact, that’s half the reason we got it in the first place!

Cross-stitch is one of those ones that I’m not very good at, but I love to keep trying to do. The problem is that I tend to lose count pretty easily when I’m working, so I’m always one or two pixels off and it totally makes the whole project run away with me.

That being said, I still love to try!

The project in the photo is my strawberry cow bookmark, which I’m still chipping away at slowly but surely. Cross-stitch, probably because of the counting part, is one of those projects that takes me ages and ages to do. There’s a decent chance I might finish this . . . sometime in the next ten or so years?

But that’s okay!

Everyone thinks you need to be fast at something or always be finishing a project to be able to say that you enjoy a hobby, and that’s just not true! You can start and stop a project as many times as you want or need to and still say that you enjoy doing it!

Embroidery is kind of a new one that I discovered over the last year, but it’s one that I’ve been obsessed with doing!

I discovered the concept of water-soluable embroidery paper, which means that you can stick it onto anything you want to embroider and when you’re done you can just wash it away and nothing will be left but the stitches you put on the design! This has really opened up a whole new world of fashion customizing for me, and I’m kind of turning into a menace about it. All I want to do is embroider stuff on everything!

There are a lot of stitches I don’t know how to do yet, but I’m pretty satisfied with how my projects have turned out so far. It’s so much fun to be able to add whatever design I want to whatever piece of clothing or accessory that I want, fully making something my own. Once upon a time I never really customized any of my clothes. I just bought what I thought looked nice online and never really made it personal in any way—but now I’m so excited to find a piece at a thrift store or in my closet and make it totally my own by adding lttle designs to it!

I hope you guys liked my list of my favorite (and whimsical!) analog hobbies! I’m going to try and talk about my hobbies more here instead of just kind of forgetting to mention I even have them (lol!). I had a lot of fun sharing my interests with you guys and I’m so curious what your favorite hobbies are! Let me know so we can geek out about hobbies together!

Until next time ~