Metacrafting

If you know me, you know I have a lot of hobbies. I quilt, knit, crochet, bead, and garden. But I realized I have another hobby, metacrafting. I define this as thinking about making stuff, and reading books about making stuff, rather than actually making stuff. Metacrafting is cheap too, since you can do it just by going to the library and checking out endless books on the craft/hobby of your choice. Then you can sit in bed and look and the pretty pictures in the books and imagine you will someday make all the nice thing. Now with the internet, metacrafting can be infinite, since you can just blog hop from craft blog to craft blog all day, imagining that someday you will make things like those you see in blogs.

I think this started for me when I was finishing grad school, and I became obsessed with gardening. I was living in a house, finally, that had a yard, and so I could actuelly get interested in gardening. I must have read hundreds of gardening books. Then I moved back into an apartment. I didn't do much actual gardening.

A few years later I moved to Ohio and got interested in quilting. I would go to the local library and get an armful of quilt books and read them all week, then go back to the library the next week and get more. I did this instead of actually making quilts.

Now I am into knitting and crochet, but I find that I enjoy reading about knitting/crochet almost as much as I like doing the actual craft. I get many books out of the library, and regularly read five or ten knitting blogs.

I like to think it is the same as liking music but not actually playing an instrument, of liking to eat more than liking to cook. And it saves money.