4 'grown-up' crafts to do at home
Staying indoors and staring at various screens for hours on end can get monotonous. Making something with your hands is a great way to escape into your imagination and come away with a something special — a craft project that’s been lovingly made entirely by you!
If you need a creative outlet, you don’t need to resort to whatever is left in the children’s art cupboard. Instead, consider these grown-up DIY projects and crafts for adults at home. The supplies can be easily found around the house, purchased online or picked up from a local hobby shop or craft store.
Hand embroidery
Embroidery is an easy-to-learn type of needlework that can be super fun! All you need is an embroidery needle (which will be larger than a regular hand-sewing needle), colourful thread called embroidery floss, a piece of fabric and a circular hoop to hold the fabric taut.
Watch some tutorials online and create a practice stitch sampler to get the hang of the basic backstitch, running stitch and other embroidery techniques. Then you’ll be ready to embroider a design onto a denim jacket or woven top. You can also use your embroidery as decor: Simply stitch your design on a loose piece of fabric and display your original hoop art around your home.
Embroidery can be used to embellish your wardrobe or artwork for display around your home.
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Clay sculpting
Clay projects can be great crafts for adults — but just because you don’t have access to a blazing kiln doesn’t mean you can’t start creating some ceramic pieces at home! Some of our favourite ceramists such as Tantri Mustika and Ceramiques are offering at home clay kits – you can even send them off to get kiln fired in their studios and follow along via their online tutorials!
You can hand craft little figurines for your work-from-home desk setup, trinket dishes for your dressing table, pots for your indoor plants and ceramic planters for your herb garden.
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Natural bundle dyeing
Natural bundle dyeing is a fun way to explore the colours in nature, whilst creating a keepsake item for your home. Choose plain white or unbleached natural fibres like cotton, linen or silk for this project and you will end up with some beautiful cloth napkins, tea towels, pillowcases or neck scarves.
First, you will need to prepare your fabric with a mordant. Once the fabric is dry, lay it out flat and sprinkle your natural dye materials onto it. These can be things like dried eucalyptus leaves and marigolds from an old flower arrangement, or onion skins, avocado peels or beetroot from last week’s grocery run. Raid your spice cabinet for brightly coloured ingredients like cumin and turmeric, too. Roll up the fabric and tie it up in a bundle with string, then steam it over a stovetop for about half an hour or until the colours are bright enough. The results will be a beautiful, natural assortment of earthy hues!
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Collage art
You’ve probably created a collage at some point — perhaps during primary school or when it came time to create a mood board for your home. But collage can be a wonderful craft for adults to do at home. Gather up old magazines, sheets of colourful cardstock, gift wrap and scrapbooking paper along with a pair of scissors and a glue stick.
Challenge yourself to create a vision board for your future using imagery that inspires you. Or, like brushstrokes in a painting, use tiny bits of paper to create a collaged image of something new. You can also collage note cards to mail out to your loved ones.
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