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New Hobbies for a Winter Quarantine
Beyond baking sourdough bread, here’s how I’ll be staying sane inside.
This March, as more and more of us we’re forced indoors thanks to COVID-19, it seems like more and more people started to adopt pastimes that were already staples of my small city work from home lifestyle. We collectively baked bread, started gardens, took up knitting or crochet, and bought so many mason jars it became difficult for seasoned canners to find them anywhere.
As the winter months set in, and it looks like the 2nd wave will be keeping Canadians and much of the rest of the world indoors, I’ve built myself a nice little set of distractions beyond Netflix.
Handspinning Yarn
While I’ve been crocheting and knitting since I was a kid, I tried creating my own yarn a few times with a drop spindle while I lived in Maui briefly a few years ago and had access to a giant cotton bush (cotton fibre is not something I would recommend trying to learn to spin with, particularly when you’re learning from Youtube on a very cheap spindle, but hey, it was free). I told myself I would eventually test the waters again, at some vague point in the future when I had space for a few sheep, or at least an angora rabbit. While I still live in a rented home in town that unfortunately does not allow pets, I was able to track down a local sheep…