Hobby burnout

I don't want to post too many pics of O here, but this is one of my favs ^_^  The toy moved every time he breathed and he was completely stunned by it.

I was reading this post from Noble and Daughter on Unheathy Sewing recently and could really relate.

Sewing became my sanity saver when O was a little baby - he had tummy issues that meant he had a lot of trouble sleeping and I was a very fraught and anxious new mum.  In that blissful ignorance of the not-yet-parent I had promised to make my sister's wedding dress for early December 2014 (O was born in at the start of June).  It wasn't a complicated dress, but when O was born we hadn't even really decided the design yet, let alone started making it.


But I had promised and I was going to make it so I worked on carving out whatever time I could to sew...and found plenty.  Much more than I thought I had when I was in the throes of tiny baby time.  Since I had to find time to sew it became a refuge: a completely valid space to have time to myself without new mum guilt.

Once the dress was done and the wedding had passed I still made a point of carving out time for sewing and found plenty of reasons. M needed costume or I wanted to make birthday or Christmas presents for people.  I needed just the right coat or dress or whatever and had to sew.  Then people started requesting things and I was only too happy to oblige.  By September 2015 I had 4 Christmas presents, a coat and god knows what else that I felt I absolutely had to sew.  Between September and Christmas I don't think I had a day off from sewing - every minute here or there I'd pick up something to pick at.

The dress, complete with crazy fluffy shrug

Needless to say this did not turn out to be terribly healthy.

I started obsessing over how much sewing I had to do and yet piling more and more projects on at the same time.  It stopped being a way to relax and keep my sanity and turned into...well the exact opposite.

Thankfully I realised that and I've been taking steps to sew for pleasure and not as a horrible grind - it's my hobby after all.  I love it and I want to keep on loving it.  I still have projects I'm doing for people (will be posting about a couple soon hopefully) and the list of things I want to make for myself grows far far faster than I can possibly make, but that's ok.  I'm always going to have more things I want to make than time to make them no matter how fast I learn to sew so there's no point pushing and pushing myself till I get stressed.

This may be a clue to a current project...

Of course I still do sometimes obsess over how much sewing I feel I have to do, but instead of being weighted down I'm trying to focus on all the possibilities stretching out in front of me....it's going to be so cool!