Share your obscure passion - Are you into Mongolian basket weaving?

i love painting primitivistm(when you paint like children and antient people) and cave-like art.
Usual painting and drawing was my passion for all life, but it became my job. Now for me it's relaxing and refreshing to draw the way kids draw, without thinking about academic drawing base.
 
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I'm a keen collector of Folio Society books. For those that don't know, the Folio Society sells extraordinarily beautiful, very well made editions of books that are considered classics or are otherwise culturally significant. They're always supplied in a slipcase and usually have a guest illustrator. My copy of Animal Farm is illustrated by Quentin Blake for instance. With the exception of a couple that have been books with a deep personal meaning to me I NEVER buy them new because they're not the cheapest things. Luckily for me there's a large group of people who buy them for the same reason that people buy collectible coins or nasty jewelry. They THINK they're making an investment. When some doddery old dude with a collection of Folio Dickens dies his kids toss them all in a box and off they go to the local charity shop where I can buy them for a fiver or so. My latest pickup is William Golding's Lord of the Flies.
 
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Stories from the past, superstitions and folk lore. The very small and local things are being forgotten as people die off and I think that's a shame. When a village or small town was very remote their versions generally didn't travel outside of that area because few people traveled.
It mainly involves talking to very old people and I really should have written things down because I'm starting to forget myself.
 
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Obscure nutrition and supplementation protocols. I can accidentally spend the entire day reading pubmed studies about micronized zeolite clinoptilolite, sulforaphane inciting mesenchymal stem cells to cause hyperplasia, or self-induced psychosis via molybdenum chelation of copper.
 
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I study disasters, natural or manmade, from a variety of perspectives. While the lead up, event, and immediate impact are interesting the changes to society and how it affects us today are fascinating. We have new safety standards, tech, and even fashion that all stemmed from horrific events.

The only disaster that freaks me out a little is plane crashes.
 
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one of my big passions is recreating medieval style manuscripts and illuminations, not just by sight but with materials as well. the past month I've been slowly figuring out how to recreate iron ink from complete scratch: finding iron rich rocks, creating rust from said iron deposits with home made vinegar, finding and crushing up oak apples, and mixing that shit together into a great ink.

ive also been trying to figure out how to create my own vellum. the most aggravating part is most of the information you find online on how to make it seems to just be either bad or outright fucking wrong. for some reason everything I found online said that vellum is made from stretched and dried animal hide, but this creates a paper so poor and dense I could use it as a plate to eat off of.
after some experimentation I found out that the best vellum can be made not from the hide itself, but from the layer of membrane that is pulled off of animal hides when tanning them for their fur. this is dried until it is just a bit tacky, and then stretched by hand to create a soft, pliable paper that readily absorbs ink, and looks and feels almost identical to cellulose paper.
 
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Hecate said:
one of my big passions is recreating medieval style manuscripts and illuminations, not just by sight but with materials as well. the past month I've been slowly figuring out how to recreate iron ink from complete scratch: finding iron rich rocks, creating rust from said iron deposits with home made vinegar, finding and crushing up oak apples, and mixing that shit together into a great ink.

ive also been trying to figure out how to create my own vellum. the most aggravating part is most of the information you find online on how to make it seems to just be either bad or outright fucking wrong. for some reason everything I found online said that vellum is made from stretched and dried animal hide, but this creates a paper so poor and dense I could use it as a plate to eat off of.
after some experimentation I found out that the best vellum can be made not from the hide itself, but from the layer of membrane that is pulled off of animal hides when tanning them for their fur. this is dried until it is just a bit tacky, and then stretched by hand to create a soft, pliable paper that readily absorbs ink, and looks and feels almost identical to cellulose paper.
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How on earth do you get into that? I mean it's super interesting. Have you tried making hemp or linen fiber paper as an alternative to parchment?
 
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Hecate said:
one of my big passions is recreating medieval style manuscripts and illuminations, not just by sight but with materials as well. the past month I've been slowly figuring out how to recreate iron ink from complete scratch: finding iron rich rocks, creating rust from said iron deposits with home made vinegar, finding and crushing up oak apples, and mixing that shit together into a great ink.

ive also been trying to figure out how to create my own vellum. the most aggravating part is most of the information you find online on how to make it seems to just be either bad or outright fucking wrong. for some reason everything I found online said that vellum is made from stretched and dried animal hide, but this creates a paper so poor and dense I could use it as a plate to eat off of.
after some experimentation I found out that the best vellum can be made not from the hide itself, but from the layer of membrane that is pulled off of animal hides when tanning them for their fur. this is dried until it is just a bit tacky, and then stretched by hand to create a soft, pliable paper that readily absorbs ink, and looks and feels almost identical to cellulose paper.
Click to expand...

This is fucking awesome. To add to what @LazarusOwenhart said, if you're interested in papermaking for the sake of it, making paper from silk carrier rods might also be a fun thing to look into. I got a big grab bag of assorted silk products a while ago - there's lots of really interesting byproducts aside from just the silk fibre, such as throwster's waste (which is covered in sericin, i.e. the stuff silkworms use to glue their cocoons together - I'm trying to work out an easy way of degumming it).

(Maybe there should be a separate thread for craft talk?)
 
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Buying old stuff off flea markets, ebay and other places and reparing it. Sometimes also dumpster diving. Mostly electronics. Then I resell it. I don't need the money at all and when push comes to shove it isn't always that profitable but it's interesting to me and I get to look at other peoples electrical engineering while also training my skills. It taught me that even the simplest every day items sometimes have an enormous amount of innovation and engineering thought put in. Some things were put together in really clever ways, some others in very shoddy ways where you have to wonder why they even work. There's not always a connection to the percieved market value of the item.

It also really opened the eyes for me regarding what society throws away. In a lucky week I could outfit you from everything to a home computer to a stereo, smartphone, HD- and 4k TVs and even gadgets like ereaders and mp3 players for a tenner. I recently picked up an eink reader for 2€. The repair involved a dot of glue to hold a cable down better. When I started off with computing, the computer in that eink reader would've been considered incredibly high end and it would've been faster than anything that comes at least 20 years after that point.

I also picked up tons of old computers from the 80s and 90s up in the process of this. Those I have mostly kept.
 
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