Crafting might just be America?s most popular hobby. The are an awful lot of us looking for hobby room storage and craft storage drawers: in 2010, 56% of American households were doing some kind of crafting at least once a year. By 2017, that number had become 63%. In fact, there are 21 million quilters in America alone! If you love crafting, or just love trivia, here are five fun facts about this pastime that you should know:
- Crafting is more than a hobby for a lot of people. The crafting site Etsy surveyed 5,500 of its sellers from the United States and found that 74% of them considered their Etsy shop a business rather than a hobby. The size of the industry in the United States was $44 billion as of 2016. These numbers keep rising, so we?re going to need a lot of hobby room storage to fit all the craft cubes and hobby storage drawers!
- The arts and crafts movement is older than you might suspect. It was William Morris who founded the movement in the middle of the 1800s. He was sick and tired of mass produced items. Scrapbooking became a thing around the mid to late 19th century, when photography was popularized. The scented candle isn?t that new, either. Americans were making them during the colonial era, from bayberry. Sewing circles came about in the 1860s, as women banded together to make and sell quilts. Your great-great-grandmother was likely as worried about the best craft storage ideas as you are.
- We might like crafting for the dopamine high. It doesn?t always make everyone?s brain release dopamine, but crafting can sometimes have this effect. The British did a study in The British Journal of Occupational Therapy and found that 81% of depressed people reporting feeling happy after knitting. That alone is a good reason to give crafting a try!
- We use some seriously cool stuff in our crafting projects. Take super glue: did you know a small dab of it is strong enough to hold up a Jeep? (Don?t try this at home, kids). Shea butter is popular additive in all kinds of skin and lip ointments, and it comes from the nut of a tree in Africa. To get the butter, the nut gets roasted, cracked, and ground into a paste that moisturizes the skin quite well.
- There?s crafts you?ve never heard of. Some people do bookbinding, which might not surprise you. But stone balancing is also considered a craft. The trick to it is finding the precise balance to allow one to balance on rock on top of another in pleasingly artistic ways. If you plan on taking up this craft at home, you might need to expand your hobby room storage; but most people practice it outdoors. Lutherie is the art of designing musical instruments using altered parts, or even creating all new types of instruments.
Crafting is good for you. It can help you feel better, give you something to do, and even provide some extra money if you want to see your crafts online. Most of all, crafting is just plain fun! If you haven?t tried it yet, get yourself a little arts and crafts storage cabinet and try some things out til you find just the right craft for you!
