I think somewhere between childhood and adulthood, a lot of us accidentally decided we weren’t creative anymore. Good news, I’m still creative and I want to share my list of crafts for adults.
I personally believe creativity is a muscle. You have to stretch it and relax it and if you don’t frequently use it, you lose it. I wanna help you be more creative, more whimsical, and hopefully a happier person, because I find that I’m a happier person when I’m actively being creative.
If you’re new here, hi I’m Brianna! I found my passion in art when I was pretty young and now I like to inspire others to get artsy and crafty and to enjoy art again. ArtsyDrawings.com is my craft blog and digital portfolio. Click here to learn more about me and my artsy articles <3
Maybe you stopped drawing because someone told you your picture didn’t look right.
Maybe you tried painting once, hated what came out of it, and simply decided you “weren’t artistic.”
Or, more likely, maybe you grew up.
Your free time was consumed by work, laundry, grocery shopping, emails, bills, and trying to remember why you walked into the kitchen. Somewhere along the way, making things just for fun got pushed to the bottom of the to-do list. I think that’s a real shame. We need more whimsy, we need more crafts for adults. I always put at least one fun and one tasty thing on my to-do list, today I want to plan my roadtrip to Wyoming and make homemade guacamole. These tasks aren’t inherently creative, but they can be.
You don’t have to be a professional artist to be creative.
You don’t need an art degree, a Pinterest-worthy craft room, or a mysterious collection of 47 different paintbrushes (I actually have over 80 paintbrushes!) You don’t even need to be particularly good at whatever you’re making. You just need to make something, trust me you’ll feel 10x better.
Crafting is one of those beautiful activities that doesn’t really care how old you are. Kids get to make friendship bracelets, paper flowers, cardboard castles, and aggressively glittery masterpieces, and then we grow up and apparently decide we’re supposed to stop having fun with our hands.
Guess what?? Adults deserve whimsy too.
So whether you’re an experienced artist, someone who hasn’t touched a craft supply since elementary school, or a person who just wants a hobby that doesn’t involve staring at another screen, here are 22 crafts for adults to try.
Some are useful. Some are decorative. Some are slightly ridiculous. Some might turn into a new obsession. And a few may result in something that looks suspiciously like it belongs in a tiny enchanted cottage. That’s the point.
You are allowed to make things simply because making them makes you happy.
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Crafts for Adults #1: Dye your clothes
One of my favorite ways to refresh my wardrobe is also one of the easiest: dye your clothes!
I regularly dye clothes. I can it “Dying Day” to be expressively morbid. Sometimes the color just isn’t working anymore. Maybe it makes my skin look weird, clashes with my hair, or just doesn’t feel like me anymore. Instead of donating it and buying something new, I’ll throw it in a dye bath and give it a second life. This craft is my #1 on the list because it is:
- sustainable
- chic as heck
- creative
I pretty much always have pink, dark green, and black Rit dye somewhere in my craft supplies, because those are the colors that work best with my complexion and hair. I also keep a Rit Dye ColorStay Dye Fixative on hand because it’s always sold out at the craft stores around me (RIP Joanns)
It’s also a fun way to experiment with clothes you already own. A faded black shirt can become black again, a color you’re tired of can become something completely different, and thrifted clothes can be customized to actually fit your personal style. Just make sure you check the fabric content and dye instructions first because different materials take dye very differently.
What to buy:
Try this: Before you buy something new, look through your closet for a piece you already love but don’t wear because of the color. You might be able to completely transform it with a bottle of dye. It’s basically giving your clothes a little personality transplant.
Crafts for Adults #2: Bleach Your Clothes
Let’s go slightly more chaotic.
Bleaching clothes is basically reverse tie-dye, and it’s one of my favorite ways to make an old piece of clothing feel completely new.
I like using flowers and leaves as natural stencils. I’ll lay the leaves flat across a dark shirt or pair of pants, then lightly spray a mixture of bleach and water over the fabric. When you move the flowers and leaves, you’re left with these really cool silhouettes and tie-dye-like patterns. The bleach removes some of the original color, so you get this weird, organic design that you can’t completely control, which is honestly half the fun.
I love that the plants create the pattern for you. I found clovers adorable! You can arrange them into a little botanical scene, scatter them randomly, or layer different leaves and flowers to make something that looks almost like a forest shadow. And because bleach reacts differently depending on the fabric and dye, you never know exactly what you’re going to get.
What to buy:
Try this: Go outside and collect a few interesting leaves and flowers, then arrange them on an old dark shirt before spraying. The larger, flat and defined leaves work best.
A very important craft-parent moment: Bleach is no joke, so work somewhere with good ventilation (outside on a tarp), protect your workspace, wear gloves, and follow the bleach product’s dilution and safety instructions. Never mix bleach with other cleaners or chemicals. We are making cute clothes, not accidentally creating a chemistry experiment.
Crafts for Adults #3: Make Tiny Clay Trinket Dishes
You and I both know we have too many trinkets. It’s my feminine berry-gatherer-crow-like-nature I guess. Let’s do a trinket craft where we make trinket trays for those lovely trinkets.
For these type crafts for adults, you don’t need a kiln or fancy ceramics studio, air-dry clay is a great place to start.
Essentially, the clay is fairly pliable with more stretch with more water. I even used an old foam sponge to help sculpt the shapes. It took about 72 hours to dry in Utah summer heat. And then I painted them and varnished with acrylic varnish because I didn’t have modge podge. Please note, for any crafts for adults, please research the proper varnish if you plan to mix the item with food stuffs.
You can make mushrooms, moons, flowers, clouds, blobs, leaves, or whatever your brain comes up with. I made fruit magnets with this air dry clay!
What to buy:
- Air-dry clay
- Clay sculpting tools
- Foam sponge
- Acrylic paint
- Better, Earth-friendly acrylic paint
- Modge Podge (the best collaging/varnishing glue)
Try this: Press leaves or lace into the clay before it dries to create a natural texture.
Crafts for Adults #4: Press Flowers and Make Botanical Art
Flower pressing can turn into many more crafts for adults. Once they’re flat and dry, you can use them to make framed artwork, bookmarks, greeting cards, or little botanical collages.
Collect flowers, leaves, weeds, tiny ferns, or whatever catches your eye. Press them until they’re flat and dry.
What to buy:
- Flower press
- Botanical tweezers
- Pressed flower frame
- Modge Podge (the best collaging/varnishing glue)
Try this: Create a “found in my neighborhood” botanical collection and label each plant with the date and location where you found it.
Crafts for Adults #5: Write a Poem
Okay, hear me out. Writing a poem is a craft.
You don’t need to be a professional writer, understand complicated poetry rules, or have a collection of leather-bound journals to give it a try. Just go outside and pay attention to things.
Notice the way the trees move, the smell after it rains, the weird little flower growing through a crack in the sidewalk, the mountains in the distance, or the way the light hits your bedroom window in the morning. Write down whatever catches your attention, even if it seems random or doesn’t make sense yet.
Then turn those little observations into a poem.
It doesn’t have to rhyme. It doesn’t have to be deep. It doesn’t even have to be good. You can write about a person, a place, a memory, your favorite snack, a bad day, a really pretty sunset, or that one oddly shaped rock you’ve been carrying around for three weeks.
Sometimes creativity is just giving yourself permission to notice things.
What to buy:
Try this: Go outside for ten minutes with your phone on silent. Write down five things you see, four things you hear, three things you feel, two things you smell, and one thing you can’t stop thinking about. Then use those ten things as the starting point for a poem.
Crafts for Adults #6: Make a Completely Unhinged Mini Zine
Make a tiny magazine about literally anything.
Grab one piece of paper, fold it into a little zine (pronounced “zeen”), and fill it with whatever your brain decides is important. A field guide to weird rocks. Reasons you should never trust squirrels. A ranking of every pasta shape. Tiny drawings of people you saw at the grocery store. A 6-page manifesto about your hatred of Mondays.
There are no rules, which is kind of the point.
You can draw, write, collage, make comics, or just fill every page with increasingly unhinged doodles. Then fold it up and hand it to a friend like you’ve just published the most important literary work of the century. Learn how to make a zine! Or buy this super cute pdf zine for $3 and color-in your own zine!
What to buy:
- Prismacolor colored pencils
- Faber-Castell Graphite pencils (get at least a 6B, 4B, 2B, HB, 2H, and 4H to have a good mix of soft and hard)
- Paper
- Fine point pens
Try this: Make a zine called “Things I Have Seen Outside That Made Me Stop Walking.” Fill it with tiny drawings and extremely serious commentary.
And if you mess it up? Congratulations, you made experimental literature!
Crafts for Adults #7: Make Eraser Stamps
Linocut printmaking is veering into the more artsy less crafty zone of craft lists, but still one of those witchy fall crafts for adults that makes you feel like a mysterious printmaker living above a bookstore in a small foggy town.
Basically, you carve a design into a soft printing block, roll ink over it, and press paper onto the surface. Whatever you carved away stays blank while the raised areas create your image.
It works beautifully for bold, graphic designs.
What to buy:
- Pink erasers
- Lino carving tools
- Block printing ink
- Or, you can get this Lino Stamp Making Set for $25
Try this: Start with a simple black-and-white design. Leaves, moons, mushrooms, hands, eyes, mountains, and flowers all make great first projects.
Crafts for Adults #8: Make a Terrarium
One of my favorite things to do in the summertime is help my good friend Jaimie and her business.
Moss and Mocha is a nomadic plant company based on teaching how to build and care for terrariums. According to their website, they “believe that using your own hands to create a small world of ecosystems, gives a sense of accomplishment. Caring for it, gives purpose.” They also offer free plant advice!
If you’re in the Utah area, definitely check out Moss and Mocha and ask for Jaimie!
If you are not in the Utah area, however, you can definitely still do this craft.
Terrariums are little ecosystems you create in a jar, and you get to pick out what’s in it. Grab a glass container and build a miniature landscape inside it using stones, soil, moss, and small plants. It’s part gardening, part sculpture, part interior decorating. Terrarium crafts for adults like this can be cheap too, try to use recycled materials and shop locally for your plants!
For more cheap crafts (no buy diy) check out my other artsy article: 31 No-Buy DIY Crafts Using Stuff You Already Own
What to buy:
- Glass terrarium (or thrift/recycle a glass container)
- Terrarium soil
- Miniature gardening tools
- Live succulents or air plants
Try this: Create a tiny woodland scene with moss, stones, and miniature plants.
Crafts for Adults #9: Make Your Own Friendship Bracelets
Friendship bracelets aren’t just for summer camp.
There are so many gorgeous bracelet patterns that don’t feel like a fourth-grade field trip. Try geometric patterns, color gradients, initials, or tiny symbols. Or, include funny sayings using letter beads and give out fun bracelets at your next rave or party!
What to buy:
- Embroidery floss
- Friendship bracelet string
- Bracelet-making board
- Beads (you can also thrift old necklaces and cut them up)
- 5 lbs of mixed craft beads
- Letter beads
- Super glue
Try this: Make bracelets based on your favorite places. Think desert sunset, alpine lake, ocean, forest, or whatever landscape makes your brain happy.
★ Bonus Art Supplies ★
We’re halfway through the crafts for adults article and you still haven’t found a craft you like? Boo! Try this list instead to help spark some creativity. It’s a list of some of my favorite art supplies I use almost everytime I craft. You can’t go wrong with these items:
- Posca Paint Pens – for painting anything from rocks to records
- Modge Podge – the best collaging/varnishing glue
- Googly Eyes (1000pc) – the more, the better
- Acrylic Paint Set – if your kid’s watercolor phase turned into Jackson Pollock
- Hot Glue Gun with Extra Sticks – because there’s no such thing as too much glue
- Dual Tip Acrylic Paint Pens – easy to draw on anything in your home from rocks to wood to ceramics
Crafts for Adults #10: Paint Rocks
This is another one that sounds like a children’s activity until you realize you can make some genuinely beautiful or super silly art.
Find smooth rocks and paint them with tiny landscapes, flowers, insects, animals, patterns, or encouraging messages. Or refuse to silence your inner demon and write the most bizarre rock puns you can think of. Use that creative noggin of yours to really push the limit on the “crafts for adults” part of this artsy article.
Just make sure you’re following local rules if you’re leaving painted rocks somewhere outside. Better yet, keep your creations at home or give them to friends!
What to buy:
Try this: Paint a tiny landscape on each side so your rock becomes a miniature two-sided painting. Or paint a meme on a rock. Up to you big dog.
Crafts for Adults #11: Make a Junk Journal
Instead of buying another perfectly curated journal and then being too scared to write in it because “what if I ruin it,” make a journal you’re supposed to mess up. It’s called a junk journal, and this is a safe space.
Junk Journals are an artsy culmination of old ticket stubs, torn images from magazines, vintage stickers, and glitter glue collide. These type of crafts for adults are all about capturing the essence of true, intentional, and chaotic art.
Glue in receipts, old photographs, magazine scraps, leaves, tickets, doodles, handwritten notes, packaging, pressed flowers, and random little pieces of your life.
It becomes part scrapbook, part sketchbook, part visual diary.
What to buy:
- Mixed-media journal
- Dotted bullet journals
- Stick glue
- Double sided tape roller
- Tombow Dual Tip Pens
- Posca Pens
- Fine point pens
- Vintage-looking stickers
- Ink pad wooden plant flower stamps
- Cute floral envelopes
Try this: Give each page a theme instead of writing traditional journal entries.
Crafts for Adults #12: Draw on Your Leftover Containers
Sometimes, the best crafts for adults come at dinnertime. Save that random takeout container before you throw it away, grab a Sharpie, and go absolutely feral.
I used my leftover Chipotle container and covered the entire thing in alligators. I wore my UF shirt to get bogo dinner, so Go Gators!
You could draw flowers, faces, mushrooms, cats, little creatures, or whatever weird thing your brain comes up with. If you still can’t think of anything to draw, check out my artsy article meant to inspire: 100 Creative Drawing Ideas
What to buy:
Try this: Next time you get takeout, don’t throw away the container. Clean it, grab a Sharpie, and make it ridiculous.
Crafts for Adults #13: Wear your heart on your sleeve
Here’s a craft I particularly love. As someone who has always “worn my heart on my sleeve,” I find that sometimes I need a reminder. So, I sew a heart on the sleeves of my hoodies.
I use embroidery floss, which is very cheap at your local craft store (RIP Joanns) or you can get on Amazon (linked below). And then you simply stitch a heart.
What to buy:
Try this: Create a heart, flower, mushroom, star, or little landscape. Start easy and work your way up to more complicated designs.
You Don’t Have to Be Good at Something to Enjoy It
Here’s the secret I wish more people talked about when it comes to creativity: You don’t have to be good at something for it to be worth doing.
I think artists sometimes get especially trapped in this mindset because we’re constantly comparing our work to people who have spent years practicing. But creativity isn’t a competition, and a hobby doesn’t need to become a side hustle, an Etsy shop, a portfolio, or an Instagram post.
- You can make something and simply… keep it.
- You can make something ugly.
- You can make something beautiful completely by accident.
- You can spend three hours making a tiny clay pumpkin that serves absolutely no practical purpose whatsoever.
Crafting gives you permission to play around without needing a final product that proves you were productive. It gets your hands moving, gives your brain something new to focus on, and lets you experiment without needing to call yourself an “artist.” Growing up doesn’t mean you have to grow out of being whimsical.
Creativity belongs to everyone. It belongs to the kid drawing suns in the margins of their homework, the college student making jewelry at midnight, the parent making paper flowers with their kids, the retiree learning embroidery, the person who thinks they “can’t draw,” and the professional artist who just wants to make her Wyoming trip itinerary a little more fun.
Remember, your creation is the combination of intention, task, and talent.
So pick one of many crafts for adults, gather some supplies, put on something you like to listen to, and make a beautiful mess. You don’t have to be a professional artist, you don’t even have to consider yourself creative. Just make something. Your inner child will probably be pretty freaking thrilled that you finally let them out to play.
