Here’s a small signal worth tuning into this season: the slow, deliberate rise of the analogue hobby. Not the marathon craft project that gathers dust in the corner. The quiet, half-hour version. The one that actually survives contact with a real life.
Every month I do a round-up of what I’ve been making and what I’ve been reading. It keeps me honest about the projects I half-started, and it tells me what’s genuinely worth my evening. September’s thread was all about Frankenstein — and a lemon cake that did not last the week.
Making
September was a good month for making. The cooler weather helps. So does having less daylight to feel guilty about. I made a set of little DIY clay flower frogs from my latest The Teabreak Project subscription box — a fun little diversion. Air-drying clay is one of those rare materials where the process is the point. You don’t need it to be perfect. You need it to be yours.
I pulled out a cross-stitch toadstools kit I’d bought the previous year and left untouched. I’m not the biggest cross-stitch person in the world, but this one was sweet enough. It took a couple of evenings, which is exactly the kind of time commitment I like. And I’ve been watching toadstools popping up all over the garden, so it felt like the right season to make one.
A few weeks ago I spotted a wooden craft kit at The Works for a little pumpkin stall. It was easy to put together and paint, and it’s going to be the perfect display for my Maileg mice come autumn. Small thing. Big satisfaction.
There’s something about September that makes Halloween crafting feel less like a countdown and more like a warm-up. I added a Frankenstein’s monster popsicle craft stick activity to my Halloween section, and it’s been quietly popular on Pinterest. I also picked up a new cosy Halloween colouring book and have been doing a few pages a day with my youngest. No pressure. No perfection. Just a quiet, inky kind of calm.
Baking
My son baked a pineapple upside-down cake at the start of the month. I followed with a lemon cake, then a date and walnut cake. None of them lasted long. All of them made a good reason to stop at elevenses. That’s the real test of a cake: not the recipe, but whether it gets eaten.
Reading
I finished Eleanor: a 200 mile walk in search of England’s Lost Queen by Alice Loxton in September. I wanted to love it. I did enjoy the walk itself — there’s a real rhythm to a book that moves through landscape — but I was left wanting more historical detail. I’d still like to visit one of the remaining original Eleanor crosses, though. The Victorian replica outside Charing Cross station in London is the one most people know. The originals are the interesting ones.
My current book is The Silent Appeal by Janice Hallett, a local author. I was lucky enough to hear her speak at an event at the local library last week. I like hearing what actually drives a writer. Hers, it turned out, was a writing schedule I’d politely call ambitious.
Trend Signal — The 30-Minute Analogue Hour. The trend I’d actually flag this season isn’t a wardrobe piece. It’s the quiet return to a 30-minute, hands-on analogue habit: clay, felt, cross stitch, colouring. Not a lifestyle brand. Not an aesthetic. Just a reason to put the phone down for a while. The cost-per-wear logic applies here too — a good felt or clay kit gets used many times over, and a cosy colouring book earns its shelf space in a few days. Pick one. Do a little of it every day. That’s the whole trend.
Stay on the signal.
— Sophie