This Dads Blog

Being male means that I should be into football, beer and fighting. At least that's what my facebook timeline and so called targeted ads would indicate. Unfortunately it seems that most of the males in my friends list appear to be Neanderthals but there is nothing I can do about this. Well, other than delete them all.

My Facebook Friends (not really)

Unfortunately that is not the kind of person I am. I'm really quite a friendly peaceful type who loves nature and everything in it (except horrible humans) and as a peaceful type something I thought I would enjoy was crafting.

I've done a type of 'crafting' before. For many years I loved wild camping, just me, a hammock, tarp and nature. Of course being human meant this had to be categorised and it is now affectionately known as 'Bushcrafting' - a name popularised by the near god like idol of the bushcrafting world, Ray Mears.

Ray Mears' Bushcraft (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

That was then though, back in the days when sleeping out on a cold night wouldn't render me incapacitated for the next week. Don't get me wrong, I still love camping and jump at the chance to go out for a weekend under canvas but I do like some home comforts nowadays (seems getting married has softened me up somewhat).

Now that I have a small person to look after I have a few hours in my week that could be filled doing something useful to keep my brain ticking over (like housework, a baby and a degree isn't enough to fill my time!) so I decided to look into craftfing.

crafts (Photo credit: Margarida Sardo)

My not so extensive research brought up a few resources but none of them looked like the kind of thing I would be very good at, so off I went to the Shangri La of crafting (well, to the lay person it is) Hobbycraft.

Me and the Munchkin spent a good few hours walking the gilded aisles of  Hobbycraft looking for something that would jump out at us and shout 'Hey you, I'm the craft for you'. Unfortunately none of them did, mostly because it's all just out of my budget (no really, my budget is so tight that I can't spare a few quid to keep us both quiet for an hour a day!).

Then it struck me. Years ago I'd looked into jewellery making, mostly because it seemed like a good way to make a few quid but I hadn't known where to start and I didn't have free access to the internet - oh those heady days of the 90's when we had to make our own fun!

So I eventually ended up buying a few small bits to start making jewellery with, went home and promptly forgot about it for a few days. It wasn't until I stumbled across an image of a nice jewellery design that I actually got my purchases out to play with.

Suffice to say my first attempt wouldn't have looked out of place at Honest Johns Scrapyard. I persevered though and within an hour I'd knocked up the following:

My first earrings!

Not a bad effort I thought. It would seem that earrings were the things I was good at so over the course of the next few days, whenever I had a spare moment to run into the study, I made 6 pairs of earrings.



Unfortunately I don't wear earrings and although Emz liked them she doesn't wear earrings unless they are hypo-allergenic so I've put them on ebay. I will keep making them though as it gives me something to do and I actually find it quite relaxing. Oh and our neighbour has asked me to make her some too!