Do your special interests cause you quilt?

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It's guilt. I get G's and Q's mixed up sometimes.

If the interest is something useful to society, special interests are encouraged. "Interest" is seen as discipline, perseverance, hopefulness, and/or confidence, etc. If the interest is only useful to the interested person, it's seen (depending on intensity) as obsessive, weird, sick, disabling, etc. Guilt about a special interest likely springs from the latter or a variation of it. See meme.

Thus the great toys that were on the Island of Misfit Toys.

My special interests were/are meerkats and veterinary medicine. My mom was always dead set against me being a veterinarian. I never found out why and don't think I ever will. She claimed it would be impossible for me to get into school but she never really gave me the chance either.

Why didn't you just do it anyway?

Who says I didn't? Anyway at the time, I was in a VERY rural area and my parents refused to let me learn how to drive or help me get my GED.

I read the title as "Do Your Special Interests Cause You To Quilt" and thought it was the funniest title I've seen in a while!

Not that there's anything wrong with quilting.

I sew too. I prefer to make stuffed animals. Something I wanted to do ever since I was a kid. If you can make stuffed versions of characters that are popular at the moment, you can make good money doing it. I once heard of a person making a stuffed version of a character from a video game (some lion thing from Final Fantasy), put it on eBay and was able to make at least $5,000 for it.

I couldn't sew to save my life.

I could answer that, but then I'd be making blanket statements

I like this thread because it has a
Serious and Silly side.

Even though I share comedy in stage, I used to take myself too serious off stage.

After reading this thread I realize how very fortunate I have been in my childhood.

I always loved animals, and drawing/painting/sculpting, so my dad would come home from work every day with a new animal I had never heard of and a sheet of facts about it. I would get so excited, I would look them up in the encyclopedia or in books at the library (before the days of internet), and draw each one. My mom was a painter, and so she would encourage me to make art, even when I was pretty bad. She'd sit me next to her in her adult still-life classes and at the end of each session, they'd go around the room critiquing each work, and they'd so kindly put my little finger paints up there too, giving me praise and advice for how to improve at what I was trying to display.

I realize every day how fortunate I have been to have this kind of creative support. It seems a rare thing to have parents who are happy to let their children pursue their own careers in life. Now I am a scientific illustrator, working on my PhD in biology. I study tropical insects. Though grad school is a lot, some days I wake up and feel like the luckiest sap alive.