Hobbies Archives - Corporette.com

Arts and Crafts for Stress Relief: Subversive Cross Stitch

03/07/2018 by Rebecca Berfanger 17 Comments

We haven’t had a Hobby Wednesday in a while — today, Rebecca Berfanger is sharing with us her love of cross stitch for stress relief! (Check out other discussions in our series, including how to learn a new language, adult coloring books, and more!) Thank you, Rebecca! – Kat

Do you have crafts and hobbies for stress relief that don’t require leaving the house, such as knitting, crocheting, coloring books for adults, or cross stitch? Or maybe you do leave the house — to nerd out with other people about knitting needles or a certain brand of yarn or different colors of floss you use for cross stitch.

In addition to providing a creative outlet and stress relief, many crafts and hobbies are fairly easy to learn (hello, YouTube), and you may even have a friend who’s been posting her (or his) work on Instagram who can give you advice. Crafting can be relatively inexpensive and can even save money (homemade holiday gifts, anyone?), and it pairs well with a glass of wine or a Netflix binge — just don’t accidentally spill anything on your creations.

(Pictured: “Wu-Tang is for the children” pattern, $4 from basicstitches design / “#@%&!!” kit, $14 from Subversive Cross Stitch / “And he disrespected the Wu-Tang Clan” pattern (context), $5 from SchroederSheWrote)

This post contains affiliate links and Corporette® may earn commissions for purchases made through links in this post. For more details see here. Thank you so much for your support!

Here’s how I got started with cross stitch — and here are a few helpful resources if you want to try it out:

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Filed Under: After-Work Activities, Hobbies Tagged With: hobbies, posts

How to Build Good Habits: Tips & Tricks

09/14/2017 by Rebecca Berfanger 31 Comments

2018 update: We still think this is a great discussion about how to build good habits, but you may also want to check out our post on how to stay fit in winter.

Readers, what are your tips on how to build good habits? Which healthy habits have you successfully started? Have you found that one healthy habit had a domino-type effect on other healthy habits (for example, getting to bed earlier)?

A few months ago, I started to get healthier by fitting exercise into my busy day, getting more sleep, and eating healthier. Although I bought a FitBit for points for my health insurance program several months earlier, I only recently started to use its tracking capabilities on a regular basis. I started by setting easy but meaningful goals, including how many days and minutes per week of activity. I made sure to enter all of my activities. To further motivate myself, I got a new bike. I started tracking my miles on two or three apps each day, as well as a legal pad, and set a goal of 100 miles per month. I also set reminders on my calendar. Looking back, I think it was about 4-6 weeks after I started that I realized that I was making exercise a priority and was consistently hitting my goals. I also felt healthier and my clothes fit a little better.

So let’s discuss some of the best tips on how to build good habits…

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Filed Under: Exercise, Food, Hobbies, Personal Care, Sleep, Weight Control Tagged With: posts

How Do You Use Your Instant Pot? An Open Thread for Busy Ladies

01/25/2017 by Kate Antoniades 59 Comments

2018 Update: We still think this was an interesting discussion of Instant Pot tips for busy ladies — but you may also want to check out our more recent update of super fast Instant Pot recipes (great for long workdays!).

All right, readers — who’s a fan of the Instant Pot? Which are your favorite recipes; what are your best Instant Pot tips for busy ladies?

Unless you’ve been living under an Instant-Pot-sized rock, you’ve probably noticed the hype around this really versatile kitchen appliance. (NPR just referred to its “viral word-of-mouth success” in a headline the other day.) Many of you — like me — probably either got one or gave one for the holidays and have been spending the last month experimenting (or listening to someone else talk about their experimenting). A reader recently asked for a post similar to the slow cooker recipes post but this time specifically for Instant Pot recipes, and so we thought we’d gather some helpful links and recipes today. Do you have an Instant Pot? What do you use it for? As a busy woman, do you find that the Instant Pot is better or worse than the slow cooker (where, for example, readers have complained that it’s difficult to find slow cooker recipes with long cook times to allow for their work schedules)!

Whoa: Note that you can get decals, like this one from Etsy seller Emilia Sofia Boutique. I also like this Gosling-themed decal: “Hey girl, drink some wine while I make dinner” from Etsy seller Big Dipper Designs.

Instant Pot is designed to replace a pressure cooker, slow cooker, rice cooker, steamer, yogurt maker, etc., and its fans use it to make everything from chili to cheesecake. The company offers several models with different sizes and features — the DUO60, DUO50, DUO80, LUX60, and the IP-Smart Bluetooth model — but we won’t take up space here describing the differences because Amazon already has a chart that does that. (Scroll down on the page to find it.) (Here’s a post from Hip Pressure Cooking to help you decide, too.) The Instant Pot is currently Amazon’s #1 bestseller in the Home & Kitchen category, and the price range is $80-$180, depending on which model you choose.

Here are a few resources for the new Instant Pot user:

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Filed Under: Food, Hobbies Tagged With: posts

Hobby Wednesday: Coloring Books for Adults

09/28/2016 by Kate Antoniades 46 Comments

What kinds of hobbies do you like to take part in after work and on weekends? (We’re talking about offline activities here — no computers required/allowed!) This is the first in a series of occasional posts where we’ll take a look at how to pick up various hobbies. Today we’re talking about coloring books for adults, an activity that has exploded in the last year or so. You can find coloring books of all kinds at sites like Amazon or stores like Michaels or Jo-Ann Stores — I even saw a small selection at the grocery store the other day. I’ve dabbled in this trend myself; I received a Doctor Who coloring book as a gift a while ago and just took it up a notch by buying Color Quest: Extreme Coloring Challenges from Amazon, a color-by-numbers book in which each mystery picture has teeny-tiny squares or other shapes to fill in. (The picture isn’t revealed until you’re done.)

If neither of those appeals to you, don’t worry — there are many, many options out there for coloring stress relief (or just for fun) — in fact, it’s almost overwhelming. You can find coloring books of mandalas, animals, flowers and landscapes, fashion, abstract designs, tattoos, TV and movies (from Bob’s Burgers to Buffy to Lord of the Rings), lawyers, architecture, sports, quotes, Internet-famous cats, and anatomy. There are religious coloring books, coloring books of Disney villains and Disney princesses, and several books with titles like Calm the F*ck Down: An Irreverent Adult Coloring Book (which has 800+ reviews). Your favorite website may have even put out its own coloring book, for example, The Oatmeal or Young House Love.

A few books that are highly rated at Amazon are pictured above. From L to R:

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Filed Under: After-Work Activities, Hobbies, Lifestyle, Stress Tagged With: posts

How to Learn a New Language

01/14/2016 by Kate Antoniades

Maybe one of your new year’s resolutions is to learn a new language, or to re-learn a language you took in school but can’t speak anymore. We’ve listed the three main options for language learning below, but we’d love to hear your specific suggestions in the comments! Have you learned a new language just for fun, or to further your career? What are your best tips, ladies?

Traditional language programs (e.g., Rosetta Stone): You can choose from 25 languages to learn with Rosetta Stone, including Arabic, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, and more. Check out a free demo here (after picking a language). You can see the prices here; for example, right now a one-year online subscription is $199, while a two-year subscription is $209, and an instant download of Levels 1-5 is $209. (It looks like these are temporary discounts, by the way.) According to Rosetta Stone’s FAQ page, “It will take about 40-50 hours to complete the content in each level.” Here’s a review from The Economist from a few years ago and one from PC Mag.
Others: Pimsleur, Fluenz, Speed Learning Languages, Babbel
Free language tools (e.g., Duolingo): With Duolingo you can choose from 15 languages, including French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish, and surprisingly, Esperanto. This video (autoplay YouTube) explains that the program — which is free, with no ads — teaches you to read, write, listen, and speak through “bite-size skills that look like games.” You can use Duolingo on your computer or get the app, which has versions for iPhone, Android, and Windows phones. The company also offers online language certification for $20. Here’s a PC Mag review and an Economist review.
Others: Foreign Service Institute public domain language courses, Internet Polyglot
Online tutors/language partners: Many, many options exist in this category, including Take Lessons (language lessons via in-person and live online instructors, $19.95/month), Verbalplanet ($22 for 45 minutes), Verbling (varies; teachers set their own prices), Live Lingua ($9.99/hour and up), LingQ ($0-39/month), and Lang-8 (free). Here are some tips on finding and using an online tutor.

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Filed Under: After-Work Activities, Career, Hobbies, Lifestyle Tagged With: posts

Should You Keep Your Blog a Secret at Work?

12/17/2015 by Kat

If you have a personal blog that’s not work-related, should you keep your blog a secret at work? When does your company need to know? Reader K wonders…

As a fellow lawyer, I followed your blog closely back in my NYC law firm days. I now have a more flexible legal position. (I often work remotely as my primary job is meeting with clients.) My question is concerning blogging — as I can’t express much creativity in my day job, I’ve been blogging at night and on weekends (on my own non-work laptop). It’s a personal non-money making blog — in fact it’s more of a money pit. My blog has nothing to do with work, I never even mention work — nor is it controversial. (It’s about shopping & travel.) What is the etiquette concerning letting people at work know about my blog? (My work FB friends know, but I don’t offer the info to anyone unless asked.) I know you blogged anonymously for a long time — I thought about doing this but it seemed like it might hold me back (Google authorship, guest posting, etc.). Should I worry about work “finding out”?

Great question, K. I “came out” to my law firm a month or two after I started Corporette because, even though I wasn’t making much, I had started the blog as a business and was worried about running afoul of an ethics rule my firm had regarding disclosing business connections. Still, there can be a big difference between a handful of HR people knowing about your blog, and attaching your name to the blog publicly — both for professional and personal reasons — so let’s get into it.