One I do occasionally that I feel like gets a great mid point between the passiveness of knitting and more thoroughly engaged effort of things like woodworking has been making pop up cards.

I seem to have an intuitive competency at it but the combination of figuring out the layout, getting the measurements down and preparing the materials (I'll usually use basic card and style the individual pieces of card to match what I need e.g. making a card of floor-boarding for the wooden floor base) gives a huge amount of repetitive work that can be done while watching something.

The obvious next step is to invest time getting into origami so I can do more complex layouts.