Is My Hobby a Waste of Time?
What needle felting taught me about grace.
In early fall of 2020, a Saturday afternoon found me pacing the aisles of Hobby Lobby looking for wool felting needles, a wool felting mat, and wool itself dyed in a variety of colors.
Standing in the check-out line with my arms full of strange soft materials, I felt giddy, exultant, almost guilty. I had chosen a random, unnecessary, and wholly impractical activity to fill my private time — a hobby.
According to social expectations, I shouldn’t have had any leisure time. I was working two part-time teaching jobs with hazy expectations and a multiplicity of subjects — roles that would consume as much time and preparation as I was willing to feed them. It was 2020; the elections were ramping up, the pandemic was raging unchecked in Houston, TX, where I lived, and I was navigating a new marriage and my first apartment.
But I felt jealous over my private time. I fiercely guarded my evening hours against housework and teaching preparation — why, I couldn’t have said except beyond mumbling out some evasive defense of work-life balance. I sometimes felt foolish: I was setting work boundaries for what? My private life did not seem worth fighting for.
Then entered needle felting, and thus my assay into the halls of Hobby Lobby. Needle felting is the practice of using a notched, or “barbed” needle to interlock wool fibers, creating a solid textile. Many felting artists create unnervingly life-like 3-D sculptures of animals. I, knowing my limits, was more interested in felting “wool paintings”: creating textile scenes by laying small tufts of colored wool over a sheet of felt and using the barbed needle to bond the pattern to the base.
Within hours of returning home with my bag of materials, I had jabbed myself multiple times with the 4-inch needle. I had also produced a 3x5 felted painting of a white sickle moon hanging above a black sea and three dark green furs. It was clumsy, undetailed, but the hobby was an immensely rewarding use of my leisure time.
Leisure has become a rather old-fashioned word, summoning up to me images of wine-colored dressing gowns and white verandahs peopled by heavy-lidded debutantes. Leisure seems less an activity, than a category of time: time when you are not working, sleeping, or eating. Josef Piper, a 20th century philosopher, rejects both this loose aristocratic association of entertainment as well as its negative description. Instead, he states: “We work so that we can have leisure” (18).
The weeks passed, and I continued to produce small felted paintings of questionable quality. I seemed to be acting on this demarcation of work and leisure, although I didn’t quite believe it. Needle-felting seemed like a guilty pleasure, or an expensive waste of time — especially since I was not very skilled at it!
It would have been easier to defend myself had I been rolling out sophisticated felted masterpieces — like the ones I saw shared on Instagram and sold on Etsy (Yes, there is a needle felting community on Instagram!).
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I cycled through several stages of justification for my newfound hobby and use of leisure time: one was the aspiration that, after months of practice, I could begin felting pieces on commission and sell them online, therefore making practical use of my time. This could evolve into the veritable “side-hustle,” revered by Millenials and Gen-Xers everywhere. My guilt over wasted time would be dissolved from the inside, a hobby converted into “the grind,” find freedom through the gig economy…
That particular stage didn’t last long. Another stage was felting presents and Christmas tree ornaments, which was more successful as a justification. But the holidays have passed and I’m still felting. Still spending my leisure time jabbing a tiny needle into a pad of felt, shaping magenta-colored hills and live oaks draped with Spanish Moss. Some of felted pieces are tucked away between books on the shelf, others buried at the bottom of my craft box. I was repeatedly drawn to the practice because of the way that the wool itself seemed to determine my painting. Its texture kept wresting control from the needle.
Josef Pieper writes, “We work in order to do something other than work…This ‘something other’ indicates an activity meaningful in itself.”
Now, this activity that is “meaningful in itself” — that is a high standard indeed, and one that my feeble needle-jabbing seems scarcely to match. For now, let us only say confidently that we pursue leisure not so that we may, with equal portion discipline and passion, convert our leisure back into work for returns, but that we may do something different completely. In leisure, we go from being single-mindedly indispensable to our workplace and colleagues — driven and dynamic, or perhaps harried and insecure — to simply ourselves.
As a child, I used to play with the multi-colored craft scraps my mother kept stuffed away in a plastic Ziploc. Felt is often used for children’s craft projects because it doesn’t fray when cut. I trimmed the felt into crude tunics for the families who lived in my dollhouse, feeling like a real seamstress. So now I return to it, to its softness and tractability, its bald humility.
Felt is one of the oldest textiles in the world. It was originally made from the natural fibers of animal hair, usually sheep’s wool. It has several origin myths, both featuring the theme of inevitability and accident. In one, the animals of Noah’s Ark shed fur and hair that coated the wooden planks of the floor. In the weeks of their captivity, the animal’s urine and sweat alchemies the loose fur into a solid carpet, beaten into shape as the beasts paw, mate, and sleep on it. This corresponds to the practice of wet felting, in which loose wool interlocks into felt through a long process of wetting, soaping, rolling, and drying.
In the second myth, two saints, Saint Christopher and Saint Clement stuff their boots with animal fur to prevent blisters from forming as they flee persecution. When they reach their destination, they tug off their boots and discover that they are now wearing soft, solid socks — felt socks.
“What constitutes, here and now, an activity meaningful in itself?” Pieper asks us. “if we are unable to answer this question, then we will also be unable to resist convincingly the claims of a world absolutely defined by work.” That same brutalizing claim had been laying hold of me, even while I had no distinct answer to Pieper’s question. My response was a silent escape to the crafts store and submission to the strange, insular rules of needle felting, which evaded my attempts to optimize or monetize it. Imagine a camel’s delight at discovering that, against all odds and without its own effort, out of its own shed fur and pee and relentless cloven pounding, it has made felt, an original textile!
“One of the fundamental human experiences is the realization that the truly great and uplifting things in life come about perhaps not without our own efforts but nevertheless not through those efforts. Rather, we will obtain them only if we can accept them as free gifts” (Pieper, 25)
Free gifts: gifts do not come with guilt, and gifts are not justified or deserved. A hobby is not necessary, and yet — for me, perhaps it was.
Pieper, Josef. Only the Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation. Trans. by Lothar Krauth. Ignatius Press, 1988.
Patron Saint of Feltmakers: A Legend about St. Clement and Felted Socks (blancraft.com)
