Just ‘hoo’ am I, and what can you expect from Hobbyhoo?

My name is Jen.  I love owls, and other any cute or interesting animal, really.  I’m a weary high school English and history teacher by day and an eclectic hobbyist by night.  This isn’t a recent development; I’ve been finding unique creative outlets to engage in my whole life. 

My early hobbies included music (I’ve played the piano since I was five years old) and anything artistic that I could get my hands on.  As a young girl, I was always drawing or coloring something or creating some kind of silly one-woman radio show using my cassette tape recorder.  My parents got me every kind of instrument they could get their hands on so I could express myself.  I even had a huge accordion that we found at a yard sale.  In a box somewhere in my parents’ garage, there is some surviving video evidence of me playing it while prancing around happily in my front yard!

I made beaded jewelry for myself and my friends and always presented homemade crafty gifts to my family members at Christmas.  As I got a little older, I enjoyed writing short stories and song parodies and making stop-motion videos of my action figures and Barbie-sized dolls with my parents’ huge video camera.  (Agents Mulder and Scully were always up to something intriguing!) 

My grandma often included me in her creative hobbies as well, including having me help her pin her beautiful quilts together when she could no longer get down on the floor to do it herself.  I eventually followed in the footsteps of my grandma and my mom and learned to crochet…I never did quite catch on to knitting, though!  About three years ago, I learned to sew by making an adorable lap quilt with my mom, and this past year, my dad spoiled me with an amazing Janome Skyline S7 sewing machine to help me run wild with my new-found love of quilt-making.  My biggest problem now is keeping my spare bedroom clean enough to use it effectively as a sewing room!

When I got married, I discovered that I enjoyed cooking.  Especially baking.  It’s not a stretch of the truth to tell you that I’m very well known for my chocolate chip cookies.  I’ve been making them for almost fifteen years now, and they never go amiss.  (I’ll post the recipe the next time I bake them…I’m always happy to share it!  They don’t always turn out for other people, though.  I think the secret ingredient is love.)

Ever since my husband, Alex, introduced me to tabletop wargaming in 2003, I have also been completely enthralled with the myriad miniature worlds associated with this hobby.  I’ve always been a sucker for tiny things.  I dreamed of a dollhouse filled with perfect little furniture (and I even bought one about ten years ago, but it was so much work to assemble it, and I honestly wasn’t up to the challenge at the time!).  It makes sense that the aspect of wargaming I’m most drawn to is buildings and other terrain.  Don’t get me wrong; I love playing wargames, and I think miniatures are amazing, but terrain is where it’s at for me.

Alex and I play so many different games that it’s difficult to fit them all in to our schedule, but it’s still great fun!  Like most people in the hobby, we have more than a lifetime’s worth of assembly and painting ahead of us, but that’s just part of the fun as well.  I have so many things I’d love to share with you, and by posting them to the blog, I hope to get some added motivation to complete many of the projects that have fallen by the wayside when life has gotten in the way.

Here are some of the things I’d like to share with you here on Hobbyhoo:

• Finishing assembly and painting of various MDF terrain, including:
  • Wolsung buildings, walls, and stairs (by Micro Art Studio)
  • Twisted buildings, stairs, and lampposts (by Demented Games and Miniature Scenery)
  • Various Fallout-inspired retro/post-apocalyptic buildings (mostly by Sarissa Precision)
  • A few bits and pieces by 4Ground
• Painting up plastic buildings, including modular Mantic kits and more
• Painting around a metric ton of resin and hard plastic scatter terrain, mostly post-apocalyptic (by various companies)
• Learning new techniques and painting up a LOT of minis.  To give you a small idea:
  • Our larger tabletop game systems include Warhammer 40k and 30k/Horus Heresy, Age of Sigmar, Kings of War, Beyond the Gates of Antares, Dropzone Commander, and Black Powder.
  • Our smaller tabletop game systems include This is Not a Test, Strange Aeons, Deadzone, Wolsung, Twisted, Blood and Plunder, Frostgrave, Pulp Alley, Rogue Stars, and SAGA.
  • I know I’m forgetting something!
• Showing off some cool and unique table setups and offering recommendations
• Battle reports
• How to play and/or a look at some of our many miniature-heavy board games/hybrid games, such as:
  • Shadows of Brimstone
  • Mythic Battles: Pantheon
  • Zombicide (many iterations)
  • Dark Souls
  • Conan
  • Warhammer Quest (all types)
  • Dungeon Saga
  • Star Saga
  • Dreadball
  • Battletech
  • Robotech RPG Tactics
  • X-Wing
  • Imperial Assault
  • Star Wars: Armada
  • Super Dungeon Explore
• Tabletop news
• Interesting new Kickstarter campaigns
• Unboxing pending Kickstarter deliveries
• Storage solutions (this is a huge issue, as you probably know if you’re still reading)

Later on/occasionally, I’d also love to share some of my other hobbies, such as:

• Sewing
• Baking
• Jewelry-making
• Miscellaneous crafts, like ‘diamond paintings’ (paint by number with rhinestones)
• Writing fiction

Thank you for your interest!  I hope to provide you with great content for years to come!