For those of you who have dropped by my ‘spot on the hill’, you will have learned about my most recent hobbies. I would think that most people have developed a hobby over the years, and I’m wondering how they settled on a specific interest. Was the idea passed down from an older family member? Did it start with something you learned in school? Did it just happen?
I’ve had a wide variety of ‘hobbies’. I think my first real personal hobby was making scrapbooks… not the kind that had fancy kits with paper cutters, theme pages, stickers, and punches, but a book of plain paper pages that we could stick clippings from magazines and newspapers, save our birthday and Christmas cards, and write stories on lined paper and paste them in our scrapbook. We saved pictures of movie stars, heros from many different countries, and special events that caught our attention. I still have several that I put together… the coronation of King George VI, 1947 wedding of his daughter, Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip, then the 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. These were special because we hadn’t heard of television at that time. And guess what... I'm still a royalist!
Can crafts like knitting, crochet, quilting, and petit point be considered hobbies? My mother considered the first three to be necessary abilities, and I learned some of her crafts. But when I asked Google to define a hobby, the answer is “an activity done regularly in one's leisure time for pleasure”. The closest that I got to that definition was my collection of glass, particularly the telephone and telegraph insulators. I knew what they were used for when growing up on the farm, my husband was a repairman who would climb poles to replace the insulators that had been used in target practice by the ‘locals’, but why do people collect them? One would make a great ‘paper-weight’ but what does one do with several hundred insulators? I started by putting many on our retaining wall… it was the old glass sparkling in the sunshine. I then discovered a large club of insulator collectors, and learned there was value in some of these vintage ‘treasures’. Here is a picture of one of my ‘treasures’ that I bought at an auction sale. It was in a box of 10 insulators and my bid of $5.00 was the only one given. It was the color that caught my eye, and years later, it was the color that caught the eye of the person who bought it from me on Ebay. I was in shock when the Buyer thought that his bid of $95.00 was a real steal!
We often wondered what would happen to the collection that I had… they were pretty, some were sought after by collectors, and there wasn’t one person in our family who even understood my interest in ‘that stuff’. Then one day, I read an ad on our local Kijiji website, posted by someone in our area who was looking to purchase a medium to large collection of glass insulators. Following a phone conversation, he arrived with his truck, asked a lot of questions, and … SOLD! He was happy with his truckload of glass, and I was happy with the cash in my pocket. That was the end of that hobby!
Now I just tell people that my hobbies are computers and photographs!
Tags: Scrapbooks Glass Insulators Crafts
