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.
Nail dio power
For me it was Badminton. You can start off with cheap $15 rackets and plastic shuttlecocks. Now my racket is $260 and I play with feather shuttlecocks which are about $2 a piece and only last a few rallies.
None of my hobbies are inexpensive (bikes, guitars and parenting)
Every time a friend tries to get me to take up snowboarding or some other gear based hobby I’m like, “are you fucking insane?”
Dog training/sports.
Here I am thinking “I need to get more active and it’ll be fun to do stuff with my best bud Link” (Link is a 4 year old golden retriever)
Starts with basic training obedience classes, no biggy. Then they offer Rally classes, which is basically obedience plus some fun stuff, cool, I’ll take that class. Oh, I can get a cool title for him? Sure, we already trained him, why not! Ok he needs 3 successful runs, and each run attempt is $25…? k…
Rally Novice acquired…fun but… Was that really worth 150 for the class + $75 for the three runs? …sure whatever
Ooooo agility sounds fun! Let’s do that! $150 for a 6 week session, that’s not bad! 6 months and many sessions later + buying practice equipment… I’m officially poor. My dog is a happy boy, and I’m more active, but FML this is a rabbit hole lol
We’re having a lot of fun, and my dog is a happier more obedient boy, but man was I not expecting the crazy expense. Those people with the dogs that have a bazillion titles and letters after their names? They’ve spent a literal fortune on that dog. It’s absolutely mind boggling.
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.
Just started crocheting, and I’m just holding myself back from buying all the yarn, it’s gonna get bad
Whatever you do, don’t go looking for yarn on Etsy. Fuck, I’ve said too much.
TOO LATE.
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.” 🫠
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.
Yeah protip never buy a hobbyist anything unless they tip you what they want.
Yep. I’m into fountain pens, and I’ve received cheap feather dip pens on two separate occasions. Didn’t have the heart to tell em.
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.
Nice interrobang usage
Thank you for noticing!
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 😭
Music production. You start with pirated FL Studio and sone freeware plugins and the next thing you know is you’re planing your hone studio with room treatment, expensive monitors, an expensive interface, aonther evrn more expensive interface, that one vintage compressor you absolutely need, a tape machine, and then you want I synthesizer, just a small, versaitle one, and next thing you know is you’re buying the second euro rack for your mod synth because there wasn’t enough space in the first one, because you need that one filter, and since you got lots of free slots now, why not buy some more fx. Fx can’t hurt, right? And maybe one oscillator, you always wanted a fifth one…
Every. Single. One.
That is the right answer.
My dad got me in homebrewing so at least in that one I didn’t invest much because I use his (our) setup.
Exactly. Some more than others but currently:
Magic the Gathering, eletronics (repair/modding), retro video games, mechanical keyboards, coffee, board games, even cooking… I wanted to fix my Switch because I didn’t want to pay $120 for the repair and I definitely already paid more than $120 in tools. I will use them for other repairs and modding things so it isn’t that bad.
Flight-simming. I started with a cheap joystick. Now my desk is littered with touch-screens, custom controllers etc.
Thinkpads.
My humble used office desktop turned NAS quickly became a dual-processor, 64GB ECC machine with more storage and processing power than I’ll probably ever need.
Scale modeling – you can pick up a cheap kit at a big box craft store with some paint and glue for $40. Before you know it, you’re importing specialty kits from Japan, rigging up a spray booth in your basement for your airbrush, and taking trips to air museums to get reference photos of the zinc chromate primer for a cockpit interior.
For me, it’s board games. I figured a few good board games could last a while. I’m sure you are (incorrectly) guessing the next step, that I just bought too many.
No, I bought Kingdom Death: Monster. And now I want the expansion packs, which combine to nearly $3000.
Fishing. Who would have thought it was so easy to get addicted to buying various baits and lures.
That would require me to have lots of money to invest.
Playing music. Started on a shitty hand-me-down acoustic guitar. Got a better guitar. Got an electric. Got a better amp. Got a couple of pedals. Got a better amp. Got like 6 more amps, some cabs, 5 more guitars, a huge pedalboard, a cello, a keyboard, an audio interface, attenuators, mics, etc etc.
You gotta understand… I need all this stuff. There are subtle differences that you’ve never noticed before but will probably hear once I do an a/b comparison for you, and I absolutely must get an AC15 next to round out the collection instead of buckling down and recording something.
