Busy Hands

I have a confession to make.

The urge to build, to construct, to create is deep inside my bones. 

Among the stories that my mom uses to embarrass me with* is the one that when I was about six, my great uncle came over to help my dad with some of the chairs around the house. There were two chairs that could spin around and then rock back and forth. My dad and my great uncle were going to try to lock down the chairs so that they didn't rock, because we'd had a few "incidents" with my brother and me wreaking havoc with those chairs. 

They looked a bit like this, only one was
red and the other was blue.

 

While my brother quickly got bored and wandered off, I stuck around, watching, while they tried and failed to figure out how to prevent the chairs from rocking back and forth. After a while, I spoke up and suggested that they bolt the two plates together by drilling holes in the plates and using bolts to tighten and hold the plates together. My dad and my great uncle looked at each other for a moment and went "Ohh....." Within about 45 minutes they had both chairs locked down properly.

A year or so later I was given for my birthday two items: a bonsai kit and a Handy Andy junior handyman set. The former had some seeds that turned out to be dead already --I planted and watered them according to the instructions, so I know-- and the latter had a real screwdriver, a hammer, a plane**, two saws*** and just enough wood and nails to build a toolbox to hold everything. 

Perusing the internet for a while yielded this.
Although it has a triangle and only one saw,
this model also had its own metal box.

 

I had to wait a week --a sheer eternity to a little kid-- before my dad had the time to help me build the toolbox. Once that was built, I wandered around the house for days, looking for things to build. Sadly, there wasn't anything to work on, and my parents weren't interested in suggesting things for me to build (something about me hurting myself), and my toolset eventually sat in a corner of the garage, gathering dust. I couldn't afford to buy any wood without assistance, because my parents seemed to think that we lived in 1957 instead of 1977 and would only give my brother and I a quarter per week for our chores****

Pleas for a chemistry set yielded a big fat "no", but I did get one of those 175-in-1 electronic sets from Radio Shack for Christmas a year later. Alas that my parents did not like the beep sounds it made when I built the circuits in the instruction book and took the batteries away from the set, again rendering the damn thing useless. 

This was the story of my childhood: I'd get something to foster my urge to build things, get partway along, and then my parents would step in and neuter the project before I could finish it. I think this is the origin story of my vast amount of incomplete projects lying around the house, because I was trained to expect to get hamstrung or sidetracked by my interests.

That being said, by the time I graduated college I began to build a few things using my own money, such as a bookcase I designed to hold mass market paperbacks. The entirety of my F&SF book collection was in mass market paperbacks, so I knew exactly what I needed and built the thing from scratch.

Here's the proof. It's still in
my basement, 30 years later.

My interest in building things isn't limited to woodworking, as I'd posted in the past about my attempts to repair/recap an old Sony AM/FM radio, but I've also been called upon to perform emergency sewing for school projects. Such as the one time I made a dalmatian outfit for the youngest mini-Red to wear for her school play, or the time my son wanted to go as Tom Baker, the 4th Doctor, for Halloween. If you know Classic Doctor Who, you know that means the scarf. Since I didn't (and still don't) know how to knit, I bought a ton of cheap felt and stitched it together using a sewing machine, using the lengths found on doctorwhoscarf.com as a guide.*****

Among my other hobbies/projects are my on again, off again affair with homebrewing, building/repairing stuff around the house (including putting a replacement roof on the back porch after Hurricane Ike hit back in 2008), stereo speaker building, and gardening. 

 

Living proof that I can actually complete
a project. And they actually sound good, too!

But one thing that has always caught my eye but I never followed through on was garb/cosplay creation.

***

If you've ever been to a Renaissance Fair you've seen people --some performers, some just fair goers-- dressed in costume. To someone outside of the community it appears to be just that, a costume. But to someone involved --or someone from the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA)-- that's known as garb. I've known SCAdians who rummage through various patterns at a Ren Faire, looking for that one pattern that would complete their formal outfit. Or people who take great pains to study costume and clothing from the Middle Ages to get something exactly historically correct.

The link I provided above shows Faire goers as well as Faire staff (from the Ohio Renaissance Festival), and obviously not everything is historically accurate, but it certainly appears quite fun. For me, however, I've an urge to create garb and/or cosplay just because. 

Oh, I wish. The T2 Paladin Cosplay from
tamuicosplay.com. Svetlana and Benni
work their collective asses off, and it's amazing
what they can achieve.

 

But, and this is the sticking point, not for me personally. I know, given my build, I'd be more of a candidate for mimicking Falstaff or, say, Henry VIII, but I'd rather not do that.****** I would like to make stuff for someone else, however, time --and most importantly, money-- willing.

 

Thanks a LOT, Shakespeare. From
the Mary Evans Picture Library, via
fineartamerica.com.

I need practice with a myriad amount of skills, which is kind of a sticking point. Like, say, sewing. Or foam armor making. Or dying/painting. Or simply "not burning the house down".

But I look at the compositions that Kamalia puts together on her blog Kamalia et Alia, and can't help but wonder how I'd put together that sort of transmog into a real costume. Like her current one, which includes outfits entitled "Restless Dreams" and "Like, Totally, Not a Death Cultist, Okay?"

Just, wow. Kamalia, I bow to you.

 

I think I really need to brew some beer to take the edge off of this urge to create. Or maybe design an RPG setting. Or something, because I simply don't have the money or space to create new hobbies for myself.

(I bet when you saw this title that I was going to talk about Elden Ring or something, right? Well, if you want to read about an older person trying the game, go to Tobold's Blog to read about his attempts to play an action RPG that's as unforgiving as the Dark Souls/Elden Ring games as a person whose physical skills aren't what they used to be. Like him, or me.)

*There was one time, about a decade ago, when I was helping my parents out around the house with something and my mom wandered by and said "Oh, you were breastfed as a baby." I looked around, bewildered, saying "Where on earth did THAT come from?" My dad just sighed.

**My parents, in their quest to make sure I didn't kill myself by age 10, immediately took the sharp edge out of. Which, of course, rendered it useless.

***One was a coping saw and the other a "regular" saw, which they took away from me as well. Okay, they let me keep the frame of the coping saw but took away the blade portion, rendering that useless too.

****One of the reasons why I wasn't big on making the kids do any chores for money was because my time was worth so little to my parents that they simply gave us a pittance, even for 1977, to spend. I mean, I could play exactly one game of Pac-Man on that quarter allowance, which lasted up until high school for me in the mid 80s. And if I wanted to buy a paperback book, they ran $2.50 in the late 70s and then $2.95 in the early-mid 80s. (Plus tax, you know.) That'd take me 3+ months to get the money for a single book.

*****If you try to put in https, your AV program might complain about the site because it only has an http version available. Just a note.

******And while it's going to be a very long time before I lose enough weight to get my health issues under control without drugs, if I did manage to do that I'd actually consider wearing something. 

 

EtA: Corrected a grammatical error.