Balancing Act

I love to knit. And spend all my free time doing it. In fact, I create as much free time as possible so I can knit even more. But there are so many other things I enjoy doing, too. Like reading. I LOVE to read. I don't remember not always having a book I'm in the middle of. I used to get in trouble all the time as a kid for it. My mom would give me chores to do and I'd really intend to get to them but there was READING TO BE DONE. How could she not understand that? And before you condemn my mother for not encouraging literacy, it's not that she didn't. It's that she could only tolerate so much of my ignoring what she was saying or my going "in a minute, mom!" before she'd be compelled to yank the book out of my hand and hide it somewhere. I think that's where my habit of reading a few books at the same time stemmed from. She hid all the flashlights, too, 'cause I'd sneak read after I was supposed to be asleep. That didn't stop me. I'd pull my curtain wide open and read by moonlight. That certainly didn't help my already poor eyesight. Nor my glasses (I'd often wake up with my glasses smushed between my face and the book). I spent every waking moment reading. Now I spend every waking moment knitting. Obsessive much?

I've come to the realization that I really need to learn how to balance my life. I'm lucky that I have all the time I want to do whatever I want (thanks, The Doomed!) and that's why it felt like such a perfect opportunity to really see if my crafting could turn into a serious, profitable business for me. After all, if you want something to succeed, you've gotta give it everything you've got. But what's that saying? There's such a thing as too much of a good thing? Yeah. So I'm starting with baby steps. I still want to meet the goal of having most of my merchandise completed by early October, but I think I can still manage to squeeze in some recreational time.

Last fall we went to the Miami Book Fair and I bought about a dozen books at awesome prices. And even though I started reading three of them immediately, somehow they fell by the wayside. I've decided to pick one back up at a time and the first of the three is Black Dahlia Avenger. (If you don't know who the Black Dahlia is or how obsessed with Los Angeles history I am then that'll just have to wait 'cause that's a post all on its own.) This week I started allowing an hour for reading every morning. And night, if I'm not too sleepy. And it's my plan to take a full week off of knitting next week. What?! I know! I've been meaning to alter some clothes and maybe do another sewing project and some other things and I keep putting it off because I've got these knitting deadlines I've set for myself. So next week, no knitting! I'm gonna try really hard not to, anyway. I am, however, still allowing the completion of projects related to the shop as long as they don't require knitting needles (adding decorative touches, buttons, etc). We'll see how it goes!