What if you could make money doing something you love? What if work meant doing activities that are fun, relaxing, and beneficial while also making a profit? If this sounds like your dream job, then you should start looking into the business of crafting.
Everybody has a hobby, a fun activity that you love to do during your free time. In fact, 56% of people have multiple hobbies, and if taken seriously, your passion can become a lucrative side hustle. With consistency and commitment, you can even transform your passion into a real business.
Ready to get started? Check out some of the most profitable crafting hobbies you can start today.
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14 most profitable crafting hobbies
If you sit around all day and come up with new ideas that inspire others, why not put those ideas to good use and turn yourself into an entrepreneur?
Take knitting, for example. This is an age-old hobby passed down from mother to daughter and so on. Nowadays, it’s really coming back in fashion, and people are finding all kinds of new ways to do it and enjoy the craft at the same time.
You might think it’s easy, but there is a lot of training required to become proficient in knitting. Until you’re trained properly, the finished product won’t look nice enough for someone else to want to buy it.
On with the list!
1. Jewelry
People appreciate pieces that are handmade—each one is unique and made with love. This is a fun hobby that will give you, your friends and family, and future customers something to mix and match depending on the occasion or outfit of the day.
Jewelry comes in all shapes, sizes, and colors, which makes it perfect for starting a profitable crafting hobby. There are so many ways to appeal to so many different people. This doesn’t have to mean working with metals or cutting down diamonds. Instead, it can involve string bracelets, crochet earrings, bead necklaces, or flower crowns.
Figure out where you want to start, then branch out and expand your business as the profits and interest roll in. Soon enough, you’ll feel like a jeweler yourself.
2. Art & Photography Prints
Do you have a knack for knowing when to whip out your phone and take a picture? Do you have a natural eye for angles and lighting? Are you the “photographer” of the friend group? It’s time to start making a profit off your favorite photographs.
There are so many different products to create and sell with good photography, ranging from canvases to key chains. This can be as simple as selling the digital files in different sizes for people to hang around their homes as a single piece of artwork or a series of three.
It is also popular to convert other people’s favorite images into digital drawings. These can include pictures of beloved pets, wedding photos, vacation memories—anything that they want turned into cartoon or sketch form.
With an app like Procreate, it’s easy to trace people and objects. Some of the most popular digital portraits for sale just focus on outlines rather than faces. Drawing with your Apple pencil is fun and limitless.
3. Candles
Smell is an extremely powerful sense. Scents tie people to certain memories, set different moods, and fill spaces with delightful notes of their liking. Even better: they’re easy to make from the comfort of your home with some wicks and wax.
As long as you’re not allergic to wax, making craft candles is a simple enough project that anyone can do it! The general process involves melting down wax and adding in color and/or scent before pouring the liquid into some kind of mold.
Candles can be expensive, so it has become popular to buy unique, handmade candles from small businesses online rather than solely supporting larger retailers. Once you make a few test candles, it becomes easier to experiment with different types, waxes, shapes, and smells.
Though the process becomes more complex depending on your bold goals, all you do is place the wick in a vessel, heat the wax in a pot over a heat source (making sure to add colors and fragrances), carefully transfer the wax to where you placed the wick and allow it to cool.
You can create a business selling themed candles (e.g., based on movies, books, music, etc.), stick with creating popular scents, or market the fact that you use all-natural ingredients. Find your focus area and run with it.
If you want to sell your candles, consider making them into gift sets that include multiple candles or other home goods. You can list your crafted candle set on an e-commerce platform for an easy way to make money!
Plus, if you happen to be a talented candle-maker, there are even some companies out there that will turn your candles into custom orders for other businesses.
4. Wreaths
The prices of assembled wreaths go into the hundreds. Why not make your own?
Especially now that we’re into fall and approaching the holiday season, there is a huge opportunity to make festive wreaths. Fall and winter colors and objects of interest (pumpkins, sunflowers, different colored leaves, candy canes—you name it!) are easy to find and assemble into a beautiful display. Craft stores have an abundance of blank canvas wreaths that you can customize to your liking or to specific orders from customers.
Let people decorate their doors with beautiful seasonal or festive wreaths while knowing they supported a small business crafter.
5. Mason Jar Crafts
Though mason jars make excellent tools for storing foods, they are a great opportunity for profitable crafting. The sky’s the limit with mason jar crafts—really, you can make anything. In fact, you could shape your entire crafting hobby and business around mason jars, experimenting with different types of decisions and functions.
Staying within the kitchen, mason jars can be creatively labeled and painted to store spices or other nonperishable goods. You can decorate the outside of them to be used as storage containers for bathroom objects, including cue tips, cotton balls, or toothbrushes. They can be transformed into custom-painted succulent or small plant holders, soap dispensers, lanterns, or birdfeeders.
Beautiful, fun mason jars make for unique and functional interior design.
6. Homemade Signs
Have you always been told you have great handwriting and a steady hand? Then creating homemade signs might be the perfect profitable craft for you.
People love hanging signs around areas of their homes, with each one catered to the spaces they are in or sporting popular quotes or phrases about family, love, and life. They are also extremely popular for special events like weddings. Using a wood board, for instance, you can write the name of the bride and groom in pretty, cursive writing with their wedding date underneath.
These signs are always one-of-a-kind considering they are hand-drawn. They provide a perfect touch to anywhere they are placed.
7. Bath Bombs
Self-care is extremely important, and people will pay for products that make them feel as if they are at a spa without stepping foot out of their own homes. One of the most popular “self-care products” is the bath bomb, which fizzles out to turn normal bath water into a rainbow of colors and an assortment of smells.
They are essential to any true at-home spa day, and they are easy to make on your own. Using common household items like baking soda and cornstarch combined with Epsom salt, essential oils, citric acid, and food coloring, you can make the perfect bath bomb. With a quick Google search, you can find endless recipes to start with.
After establishing a comfortability with making basic bath bombs, you can start to experiment with different fun surprises inside of them, like the ones found at popular beauty store Lush.
8. Clothing & Accessories
Like jewelry, there are many different preferences when it comes to clothing. But this means there are plenty of openings for you to start your profitable crafting endeavor.
If you happen to already know how to sew, this is a great chance to put that talent to work making shirts, hair accessories, scarves, and so forth. There has never been a better creative outlet than crafting as a hobby, and the internet is there to help you eventually turn this into a business.
If you do not know how to sew, there are plenty of resources to learn how to do so, but that’s not always necessary. Instead, you can dabble in tie-dye techniques. It is easy, fun, and profitable to purchase basic shirts and transform them into masterpieces.
9. Fiber Art
This all started with knitting, but now there are several other crafts that fall under the fiber art banner, including crochet and needlepoint. These skills are easy to learn, fun to practice, and can easily turn into an extra source of income.
This is one hobby that you could work on during your downtime. As long as you have a TV or a tablet hooked up to Netflix, fiber art is relatively easy to do alone in a living room with some semblance of privacy. Plus, if you want to take a break, there are plenty of educational shows out there that can help you learn more about this craft.
If you’re not sure where to begin when choosing the right fiber art for yourself, try starting with a simple project like crochet or knitting. The great thing about both of these crafts is that they don’t cost much to get started. All you need is yarn and the right pattern, which you can find online for free or cheap.
Once you master these two crafts, it might be time to move on to more elaborate projects like needlepoint or embroidery – both of which are easy enough that beginners can pick them up in no time flat.
10. Artistic crafts
Crafts such as painting and drawing are favorite hobbies for many people who make money from home. There’s no limit on what hobbyists can create! Whether you want to sell your unique paintings or use them as custom designs for companies, artistic crafts like these can make a lot of money.
Artistic crafts are great because nothing is stopping you from creating and selling your creations from your house! Painting is one example of how you can turn your personal artwork into something that others can buy. All it takes is a custom order and some time to complete the project.
Artistic arts are not limited to painting, though. You can pick up a pencil and start sketching out logos or pictures. To save even more money on this hobby, consider using your own freehand as design software! After all, you will already know what you want the final product to look like, so why bother with software?
As for selling your art, there are plenty of opportunities out there. You could start a company or set up your own website to sell off the rest of your paintings – or you could even go the e-commerce route and have them sold to other businesses.
11. Knitting
Knitters can find plenty of opportunities to sell their goods on e-commerce shops and to neighbors and friends alike. For example, if you’re good at making hats, you could spend a few hours crafting them out of yarn and selling them online.
If you’re really good at knitting, consider taking a step up from hats and selling your knitted clothes. There’s no limit to what you could make!
Some people prefer to spend their time making their own yarn as opposed to knitting with other people’s yarn. If you want to try it out for yourself, follow along with one of the many YouTube tutorials on how to make your own yarn from scratch.
The great thing about making your own yarn is that you can infuse it with your favorite scents so that every time you knit something, your clothes will always smell nice.
Moreover, your crafts will be differentiated highly from similar offerings in the market.
12. Cooking
Like knitting, cooking is another hobby that doesn’t require much in terms of start-up costs because most people interested in cooking have already been cooking in some capacity. All you need is a keen interest and an eye for opportunity!
If you’re good at cooking, consider selling your meals online. Just sign up to a site, post your menu for the week, and you’re all set! The site will receive customer requests from your area, and soon enough, your hobby will start paying off in ways you had not anticipated before.
Alternatively, cooking classes are another way to turn your passion into money. Think about all the places around you that have cooking classes – neighborhood recreation centers, local libraries, community colleges. Now all you have to do is post a flyer in those places and watch as your phone rings off the hook with people who want you to teach them how to cook their favorite dish!
13. Carpentry
Carpenters can find work building furniture or other items for their own homes. If you have carpentry skills, there are plenty of opportunities out there to sell your services to others as well – the only limit is the extent of your carpentry skills.
For instance, if you happen to know how to build a swing set, why not list it on Craigslist and see if someone near you wants to buy it? You can even go a step further and sell the plans for your swing set online for anyone who wants to build their own.
Carpenters who are less well-versed in carpentry can use their construction expertise to build small items, like birdhouses or clocks, and sell them at a local craft fair.
14. Quilting
Quilting has more of a vintage feel to it since the art is a bit older than other forms of crafts. This may be more of an ideal hobby for someone who’s looking for something that they can do in the winter – right when the weather gets cold, and people want to stay inside and keep warm.
You can also sell your quilting items at local craft fairs, on websites, or even through a friend helping you sell them on commission. Quilters are sure to always have a market of potential buyers due to the timelessness of their art.
In terms of making extra money, you can easily make up to a few hundred dollars a month from quilting. After all, who doesn’t want a handmade quilt as a gift?
Where to sell your crafts
Though crafting is often considered a hobby, the digital age has made it easy to turn hobbies into full-fledged businesses. Websites like Etsy, Amazon Handmade, Facebook Shop, and Artfire are a few places to market your products to a base of loyal, craft-loving consumers.
These websites feature crafts of all kinds, ranging from homemade bracelets and necklaces to delicious-smelling candles to at-home spa day essentials.
Plus, with resources like YouTube and Pinterest at your fingertips, it is easy to learn how to create things by hand. It has never been easier to try something new and make a quick buck for it. People are willing to support small businesses, especially after such trying times.
Profitable crafting hobbies: The bottom line
Whether you’re already a crafting expert looking to dabble in online selling or you’re a newbie seeking a side hustle, there are seemingly endless opportunities to make money with crafting hobbies.
As with most hobbies, the first step for crafting for money is to figure out what you have a knack for and focus on it.
Are you good at making candles? Make some for yourself and test them out on friends and family to get their feedback on your candle-making skills. If people seem interested in buying your candles, take a leap of faith and make a few more. Before you know it, your hobby will be the source of all your extra income as well as something that allows you to express yourself creatively.
I hope this article has inspired you to craft hobbies that can earn you money from home. No matter what craft tickles your fancy, there’s always a place for your talents to shine.
So…what are you waiting for? The clock is ticking, and you could be utilizing every second to find both your strong passion and latest side hustle.
