What is your "inexpensive" hobby that turned out to be expensive/ you gradually invested lots of money into?

plactagonic@sopuli.xyz to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 705 points –

Edit: so it turns out that every hobby can be expensive if you do it long enough.

Also I love how you talk about your hobby as some addicts.

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Knitting. Super cheap to start, you can pick up a set of needles and some acrylic yarn for under $20. But when you start getting into nice yarns and bigger pieces, you are spending hundreds of dollars on yarn alone for a blanket or a sweater. And you want nice needles in all sizes as well as all types (double pointed, regular and circular)… more hundreds of dollars.

Moral of the story is if a friend knits you something with nice yarn, please appreciate it. Lots of effort and thought went into it.

Knitting is expensive for me because I love to start projects but I'm not great at finishing them. Good quality yarn really isn't cheap.

Weaving in the ends is the devil. I hate finishing, but I really enjoy starting 😭

I really, really love knitting. I'm not good, and I have a hard time finishing projects (tragic case of batterscain. I jump from thing to thing.), but the actual knitting itself? OMG, I love having something to do with my hands, and that something actual makes a real, tangible thing? Somehow magically out of a ball of string? What‽ It's lovely.

It's insane, though, how people who don't knit/crochet will just treat a knitted or crocheted item like it's a cheap Walmart graphic tee. They do not respect the work put into it.

Yeah. I knitted gorgeous socks and scarves in hand-dyed merino for some good friends. Come Christmas they obviously thought, oh MrsDoyle likes knitting, let's get her something knitting related! A selection of the cheapest, nastiest acrylic in hideous colours and some needles. Oooooh. Thank you so much.

Ouch... Yeah. As a general rule of thumb, if I'm buying someone something craft related it's either because I know enough about the craft to get them something truly nice, or I get them a gift card to their favorite craft related place. Outside of that, I'll just ask them what they want. Lol. I enjoy a bunch of different crafts, including wood working. A friend once got me a set of chisels when they found out I liked wood working. ... They were plastic with just the very ends being metal, and would break if you looked at the harshly. Lol. The thought behind it was sweet, but they had no idea what they were doing. Lol.

The story had a bit of a happy ending - I paired the yarn and needles with a "learn to knit" book, and donated it to a raffle a club I belong to was holding. The winner of the kit was thrilled!

Oh that's an awesome idea!

We've been discussing the need to get some of our yarn to a new home. There's so much, and it's just never going to be used as there's just literally too much.

Just started crocheting, and I'm just holding myself back from buying all the yarn, it's gonna get bad

My mom knits and she spends way more time unraveling thrift store finds to salvage the yarn than she does actually knitting stuff.

Oh yes. Yes. I went to the Edinburgh Yarn Festival a few years back. I live nearby, but met people there who'd come from all over - Europe, Japan, the US. All three days sold out. The yarns were so beautiful! And oh so expensive. But you were there in person, fan-girling with you favourite dyers and pattern designers! Spend spend spend. The nearest cash machine ran dry. Such an expensive hobby. But I can't stop.

I’ve found my people… as I cry into this shawl project on my lap, of merino fingering yarn I paid to have imported because “you want to support small yarn producers” telling myself, “it’s not soft enough. Just throw it away and buy that cashmere/silk blend that you know feels like butter.” 🫠