Crap 'hobbies' you had as a child.

[DrMadelineMaxwell]

I used to go around the village where I used to live with my notebook and pen and write down number plates. I can still recall my Dad's car plate.

This is a cause of much mirth to my kids who have clearly never known the heady excitement of a long sunday afternoon pre internet days.

By the time I could use my (redacted) chemistry set, all it had left in it was litmus paper, wire wool, distilled water and a couple of slides with random dead things sandwiched inside.
I used some matches to light the litmus paper, used that to set fire to the wire wool, looked at the slides over the flame and put the conflagration out with the distilled water. And that was a fun 30 seconds

I used to do the shrinking crisp packets thing. You can’t do that with modern packets.

My grandmother had a prolonged stay in hospital, she used to get given little cards with the next days menu on them where she ticked off what she wanted to eat. I was fascinated by them and she somehow contrived to get duplicates which I took home with me. I used to love going through them imagining what I’d choose each day, would I have cornflakes or poached eggs for breakfast, or jelly and cream or chocolate mousse for my pudding.

God i love this thread!

When I was younger a few things spring to mind....

1. Those crappy plaster of paris models that you made in the thick condom things. Once set i would paint them and they never looked anything like the pictures!

1. I was addicted to the sims. As a teen I had a laptop but the sims didn’t work on it, so in the school hols i would stay up in bed until the early hours creating floor plans on paint. When i woke up i would then create these on the downstairs computer on the sims.

1. Carving. At primary school the boys would find sticks on the fields at lunch time and then go carving. It consisted of rubbing them up and down on concrete fence posts to make the ends pointy and sharp. Pretty pointless activity that us girls could never see the appeal in!

Oh and My sister and I had one of those sticker maker machines, and a badge making machine. I remember my grandad, bless him, used to proudly wear them on his coats and shirts! They were truly awful but he seemed to love them!

I used to raid my nan’s wardrobe and then sit on her driveway banging a wooden spoon on a saucepan. When the neighbours invariably came out to see what the fuck was going on, I would pretend to be an old homeless woman who ‘just wanted a few pennies’

Created really dramatic storylines using my Barbie dolls, often including themes such as adultery, murder and suicide

Was always desperate to receive stuff in the post so would send off for any old crap that I saw advertised. This backfired massively when I managed to (fraudulently) set up some kind of catalogue account in my mum’s name and she found out

Go through the Argos catalogue and pick one item from each page. Then note the item and the code in a notebook

Not really a hobby but still a thing for me...

You used to get weekly magazines with lyrics for latest hits and I used to memorise the lyrics so I could sing along when they came on radio 1. Making tapes of top 20 on a Sunday. D-jay deliberately talking over the start to put you off of taping them. Annoying but did not put us off.

We didn't have much money, we never had a washing machine and when my mum died I became responsible for the laundry, and I had to go to a laundrette. My treat whilst the washing was being done was using the pay phone in the corner, and put some money in for Dial a Disc. I distinctly remember Rock the Boat (Don't Rock the Boat Baby) being a favourite. Eeh, kids today might have Spotify but aI am sure my 5 mins on that pay phone brought me more pleasure than instantaneous download. I wouldn't go back though!

We used to collect novelty rubbers when we were in primary. The class heartthrob, Ian, gave me a dolphin rubber. I was never one of the popular girls so I was amazed, pleased, but painfully shy in equal measure. A few days later he turned his attentions to Josie, a pretty girl who lived in a pub, and he asked to see the rubber. I showed it to him, he took it, and gave it to Josie whilst I sat there in humiliation. The perfidy of the male, lesson learned right there.....

Collecting postcards , cb handle cards, beer mats even though I was too young to go to the pub (just got any one going to get them for me lol 😂) and a shoe box filled with Bunty cut out paper dolls and outfits, and scraps kept in mouldy old books lol 😂

PrimeraVez

^

My dd has been making flower petal perfume over the last few days. It's still disgusting and I'm itching to bin it

Please can we have this in Classics!

@lemmein - there was actually things called Blakey's, that made your shoes make that clicking noise when you walked. All the rage in '83.

I do remember obsessively drawing certain things : shoes, faces, and at one particularly riveting stage, colouring in all those tiny squares in a Maths workbooks. Pages and pages full of tiny coloured in triangles!

God I used to love doing transfers. So satisfying, especially when you got it all in one go, and didn't have to go back and rub it bit more to get a missing arm.

Rose perfume, of course.
Whimseys-where did they all go? And yes, yes, to the random glass ornaments.
I ‘owned’ 2 horses, a black stallion and a white stallion, whom I ‘rode’ everywhere, including in John Lewis.
I made loads of Pierrot ornaments using plaster of Paris and painted them, still have them. Also had a rabbit mould, sometimes I used melted Mars bars! Candle moulds too. Making those weird crunchy ‘flowers’ that you put in water and they grew.
Matchbook collection, so boring.
Race courses made of books for all the hamsters I had.
Trapping and catching field mice from the garden.
Flower pressing.
Using the parallel bars in the park to do bonkers gymnastics.
My dad was a very keen trainspotter so we were too.

Personally, I collected smelly rubbers.

My cousin (much older than me) also gave me his extensive collection of beer mats (when I was perhaps 5 or 6).

I also loved My Little Ponies & Strawberry Shortcake.

My days as a teen consisted of daydreaming about marrying various pop stars from Smash Hits.

I loved the plaster of Paris moulds. I had Thumper from Watership Down. Made quite a few of him.

Used to make jars of bath salts with food colouring as (horrible) Xmas presents.

My mum had a button box, played with it for hours when little, sorting it into colours, size type etc. That was one of my favourite pastimes when I was five.

Ha @CoffeeRunner - I was completely obsessed with Julian Cope, but also wouldn't say no to Leroy from Fame.
Smash Hits day was the best day of the week.

Oh, I remember the silicon condom moulds for plaster of paris. I had every intention of making a chess set, but never got around to it.

I loved my Mum's selection of whimsies, but she got rid of them when we moved house. :(

making 'potions' in the bath. Empty bottles filled with toothpaste, shower gels, bath pearls (remember them!), shampoo.... anything we found.

@LalalalalaLlama

My sister used to do this and one time she found some little white balls which she filled the sink up with and mixed all her potions into. Then she pulled the plug and the balls all expanded and blocked the whole pipe. My dad has to take the pipe apart and spent ages flushing hot water down through the system. the air was blue that day.

I spent a lot of the 80s reenacting scenes from Dempsey and Makepeace. I took it very seriously, writing scripts based on the episodes I'd just watched and holding casting sessions in the school playground. I was obviously Makepeace everytime but had two Dempseys to choose from depending on who was in my good books.

We would spend weekend mornings rehearsing on location at the local park or Waitrose underground car park.
In the evenings I would read my telly tie in novels and play my 7 inch soundtrack single. I particularly liked the love theme which was on the B side.

I turn myself inside out with cringe remembering the day I made an appointment with the headmaster to ask if the school could purchase a video camera so we could actually film our endeavours. Weirdly enough he didn't go for it but bless him for keeping a straight face.

This was in primary school! Sadly I went to a single sex senior school and my opportunities for Dempsey and Makepeace fun dried up overnight.

DH bought me all the DVDs a few years ago but I haven't watched them as I know they can't live up to the memories in my head.

I used to like sketching multi storey car parks.

Also, I think I was about 10 at the time, I ambitiously tried to write a book about ferns.

I used to do a lot of cross stitch kits and embroidery. I think I quite enjoyed it at the time.
I also used to make lots & lots of friendship bracelets. I used to bore myself making them!
DD was born more or less on my gran's 90th birthday. We lived hours away so she only saw the DC, her only great grandchildren, a few times a year and used to try and come up with ways of entertaining them in her sheltered accommodation flat and despite being fairly infirm. When DD was about 4, she got out her button box. It was her grandmother's button box and so had been played with by about 5 generations of women in our family. DD just sat there looking utterly perplexed and the requested her chocolate biscuit and a trip to the laundry room (she found it fascinating that there was more than one washing machine in there)

Made my own magazine
Loved calling my own register
Taping the top 40 trying to stop the tape by the time the DJ started talking
Flower pressing
Drawing and tracing pictures for hours and hours
@BerryPieandCustard I loved the Argos and index catalogue! I would pick out all my bedroom furniture, house stuff, baby things you know as an 8 year old does!