Wow, motherhood! I know some of you read that and know exactly what I mean. Others read that and likely can imagine. Before motherhood, I think I thought I knew what that could mean. Now I realize that I had no idea. The days blur together, I forget to do things like shower (or I do shower and forget that I had), and schedules are a thing of the past. While there is obviously a lot that I should be finding time for (like cooking, picking up the house, and laundry), my hobbies land somewhere else entirely.
While designing, knitting, crocheting, and spinning yarn are just one of my hobbies, I think that this thought process may apply to other areas as well. The challenges with finding time to work with yarn and fiber are a bit simpler than the challenges I see with finding time to begin running and swimming again (most notably I can work with yarn and fiber in my home while my daughter naps, whereas leaving my home to run or swim during her naps is entirely out of the question during the week). Here are some of the things that I can think of that would make it easier for me to grab little snippets of time throughout the day to hone my craft:
1) Organization leads to ease of starting.
Right now my desk is a mess, my closet is jam-packed, and I'm not 100% sure that I could find my needles with my eyes closed. Some of that is motherhood related, and most of that is house-selling related because I wanted to hide away all the clutter that is typical of my housekeeping style. Honestly, I like the lack of clutter so I am hoping to keep it at bay after the move. Which means that I will need to find a nice discreet way to store my WIPs, currently I am hoping to justify the expense of adding the top shelving portion to my secretary desk from Ikea to house project bags and bins neatly within arms reach. Right now I have projects (note the absence of the words "bags" or "bins" here) piled in my desk along with binders, papers, sunglasses, baskets, and it looks like some baby clothes. So even if I wanted to knit on my current socks in progress, it would require some redecorating before I got there.
2) A project for every mindset.
So we will pretend that my projects are all easily accessed, organized, and ready to go. With the projects on the needles that I can think of, I don't particularly want to work on either of them (yes, that either implies only two projects going right now). This is because one is a prototype of a sweater that I'm a bit stalled out on, so if I am at all tired or distracted (or distract-able) this is not the project for me. The other WIP is a pair of socks worked on DPNs (those shorter double pointed needles you may have seen and thought were some sort of weapon). You can imagine that if baby is awake this is definitely NOT an option, and while I do find these socks to work up reasonably quick (making me enjoy the DPNs) I am not completely in love with this particular means of knitting socks. Clearly there are many impediments to my knitting on current projects right now because I just do not have the type of project that I have the capacity for right now. There are some suitable options in the wings including a blanket of mitered squares that I could finish, sewing the zipper into Paul's cardigan, a pair of ankle socks that needs to be re-bound off, and a pair of fun self-striping socks with a cool circle motif. Now in order those are put away somewhere, a fiddly task to begin with, not at a point that I could just grab and go, and again put away somewhere. I guess that brings us back to point number 1, doesn't it?
3) Necessities are already taken care of or the guilt of enjoying down time.
This point needed a subtitle to really drive it home for me. Yes, my desk is a mess, but I can just close it off (please note that I mentioned it is a secretary desk, love that feature) and nobody will know. The floor and bench in our living room are both a completely different story! Same with the kitchen. Now the dirty laundry is a toss up because I can close it off too a point, but when we are all wearing dirty clothes I'm sure someone would notice. In fact, I took some of naptime to write this blog post and am experiencing a bit of the guilt for not picking up the house or writing a grocery list. But just like playing with my daughter in her waking hours is not time wasted because of chores not getting done, I think that taking a few moments to knit on an enjoyable sock in the evening should not be seen as time wasted. Lately, my husband and I have been watching TV shows on Netflix, and I must wonder which is better for me as a person.
As I said much of this also applies to my other hobbies, but this is a design blog and I know I'm not the only mama faced with deciding what to do with those (precious) moments of down time. Now I'm going back to daughter time!
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