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.

Used to try and catch bees in a jar. Weirdly never been stung! Porcelain doll collection. Kylie and Jason sticker book 🙈

Flower perfume on an industrial scale.

Collecting the reflectors for bike wheels from cereal boxes.

Also wrote down car number plates, and types of lorries. I made mud pots, flower petal scent (which went off the next day) and counted butterflies. Still have the stamp collection! Happy days.

Stamp collecting. Except all it was, was my dad would buy my cheap packets of assorted stamps from a magazine, abd I sorted them into some kind of super-categorised system that only I understood. It was an exercise in cataloguing more than anything else.

Last summer I went to the Birmingham Pen museum ( Its really interesting, despite being called the Birmingham Pen Museum) and remembered I used to do calligraphy when I was a kid. I had the inks, various pen nibs, I even had a stick of wax to make seals! I had totally forgotten I even did it.

I also had a Royal Family sticker book

I'd make nests out of the cut grass on the school playing field and fill it with ladybirds I'd find

I used to catch bugs in jars.

Collect badges.

Make bike jumps in the garden to jump my BMX over.

Make carvings out of breeze blocks that were piled up in the garden using a screw driver.

Play gladiators on the stairs with my siblings and get told off for playing on the stairs.

I used to take my dad's dodgy motorbike magazines cut the picture of the bike out removing the naked women and stick them to my wall. They did look odd with boob indentations on the tank.

I used to design cafes from the Ikea catalogue - we had an Ikea from the late 80s onwards.

I was right into macrame at the height of its untrendiness in the 90s, when it started getting popular again I realised I had neither the skill nor the patience any longer to charge people £60 for a bit of old rope and a twig.

I used to do 'traffic surveys' in our first house, which was on a main road. I would sit at the window and write down tally marks for each colour of car that went past within a set period of time. We moved when I was 11, so I can't have been too old.

Recording songs from the radio in a specific order and trying to chop off the DJ's voice at the end.

In the very hot summer of 1976 I collected ladybirds. I enjoyed it so much, I collected them into cheese triangle boxes and put them in the freezer for the winter. This hobby didn’t last long. I moved into making “runs” for snails and racing them.

I collected frog ornaments and had a royal family sticker book.

My obsession was a Walkman and the music cassettes you could get from sending tokens cut out of weetabix boxes. I listened to them constantly with my headphones.

They only had about 4 songs on them! I remember one was Tears for Fears, Sewing the Seeds of Love.

All the girls on our road used to collect "fancy" paper, the fancier the better. We spent many, many hours swapping with each other, probably the same few bits of paper over and over!

Whenever I was taken to somewhere that had wallpaper samples, I’d grab a load with ‘cool’ patters, bring it home, cut them out and stick double sided tape on the back, turning them into stickers. Everyone at some point had to have one of my stickers.

Catching bees in jam jars and then releasing them. Amazingly I never got stung.

I had a royal family scrapbook with photos cut out of the newspaper and a page for each family member.
We had power cuts quite often and used to pull out strands of hair to burn over the candles.

I also collected badges from stately homes and the like, kept them pinned onto a pillowcase. I think this was an excellent plan by my parents because it meant I was always satisfied with s 50p badge from the gift shop and never asked for anything else

I collected stamps and had a flower press! And made endless dolls clothes.

Berry Pie we used to play the Argos catalogue game too!
We had a friend up the road that lived in a new build and we had to decorate each room in her house! We’d do them over and over with different budgets/styles!

This is such a great thread.
My cousin and I would spend long summers together doing all sorts of mindless stuff.
Getting all the tins out of my mum's larder, sticking prices on and playing shops.
Cutting up the Argos catalogue and sticking the pictures onto paper as a list of all the toys we wanted.
Sitting outside the house and counting the different colour cars that went by.
Nicking forms from the Post Office and spending hours filling them in.
Making perfume from rose petals and anything we could get our hands on from the bathroom cabinet.
Doing those foil scraper pictures.
Also doing those sticky felt pictures.
How the weeks flew by

Collecting paint colour cards and the Dulux catalogue.
Brass rubbings.
There was a challenge- usually set by church or school- how many items in a match box- remember that?!

I used to make paper shoes. I made loads of different designs, and you could actually shuffle walk in them.

Also made up plays with my friend. Rehearsed, made costumes, made programmes and delighted our families by forcing them to watch.

I used to make perfume with lemon balm: it was just as disgusting as the rose-petal stuff.

Also, my brother and I would roller-skate out the front with two broomsticks. The one at the front held the broomsticks under their armpits, and the one at the back held on. Train!

My DD made a show-jumping course in our garden yesterday, and did a lot of neighing

My friend and I (both aged about 9) decided to make a charity to help elderly people. We would make them food and drinks to check they were ok.
We couldn’t understand why my 40 year old neighbour didn’t want to come into the garage for a stale biscuit and some over diluted orange juice.

doctormadeleine are you me? That is exactly what I used to do! I can remember my Dad's number plate too, it was on a metallic blue ford cortina.
Another crap hobby of mine was making perfume out of rose petals and making snails and pairing the name in their shells. Then trying to fence them into a field with a fence made out of lolly sticks

@Pinkarsedfly I used to collect these huge plastic Garfield keyrings! No idea why.
I had a typewriter and my ongoing project was writing a "magazine". Total nonsense as I'd never read a magazine other than the Sunday Times comic. Bet I'd cringe to read it now.
Plus those felt picture kits, foil scraper ones, tracing pictures... making radio shows on cassette...