Analogue Hobbies in a Digital World - What Do You Do With Your Hands

[Tara_66]

The forum covers a lot of digital and technical ground. But most people here also have things they do that are entirely physical, that involve materials and tools and skills that have nothing to do with a screen.

Curious what that looks like across the community. Woodworking, cooking, pottery, gardening, sewing, instrument playing, knitting, model making, restoration projects. Whatever it is.

What do you do with your hands and how did you start?

[Kev49]

Bookbinding. Started during a period of unemployment when I needed something that had a definite finished state and cost almost nothing. Now I make notebooks and small runs of pamphlets. The smell of the materials is part of it

[ProperJobs89]

Leatherwork. Started with a wallet repair and escalated. The tools are simple, the learning curve is genuine, and the objects you make last decades. Very satisfying counterpart to the digital work

[Donna]

Bread. Not sourdough specifically, all bread. Something about the timing and the attention that the bread requires is incompatible with multitasking. You cannot check your phone while you are shaping a loaf

[Theo90]

Restoration electronics. Old radios and amplifiers from the 1950s and 60s. The components are large enough to work with your hands rather than under a microscope, the circuits are simple enough to understand, and the finished objects are beautiful

[Cole75]

Playing the piano badly but consistently. Twenty years of not touching it followed by picking it up again during a difficult period and discovering I had retained more than I expected. It is the only thing I do where the goal is not to produce something, just to do it

[Inland Sienna]

Growing vegetables. The planning in winter, the preparation in spring, the neglect in summer, the harvest whenever it happens. The complete indifference of plants to my schedule is restful

[VectorDB Cobra]

Fly tying. The materials are absurd, the tools are fussy, and the flies often fall apart. The fish do not care about any of this and neither, increasingly, do I