Speaking to other crafters, (including you lovely non-glassy people!) I have noticed many of us have the same woe, but not one that seems discussed on many of the forums. There are lots of practical threads about improving photos, promotions, best blogs, etc, but few about one thing that seems to bug many of us (except for whispered conversations and mutterings!)
It’s the what-I-love-and-want-to-do versus the what-I-have-to-do-to-pay-the-rent. I can already hear the sighs and see eyes rolling at that one!
We all love reading the inspirational ‘gave up the day job’ stories in magazines and on places like Etsy, but for most it can be an uphill struggle to juggle work, home, family without adding in all the hours the business of crafting can take – and somewhere there needs to be a few hours of actually making too!
These ‘difficult’ economic times seem to be affecting many crafters I speak to in an odd way though. Many are finding they have more time to think about crafting and where they want to take their real career - rather than the one they might be stuck in. As the economic slow-down continues we seem to be eking out work, and have more ‘day-dream’ time at our desks thinking of what to tackle next; this then leads to a frustration of being tied to a desk not achieving anything when a hundred projects sit waiting for our attention at home/studio/kitchen table/shed/workshop. Crafters are do’ers after all! We prefer to be getting on with things!
Of course the flip side is there are those of us in day-jobs trying to do the job of 3 or 4 people because businesses have trimmed their workforces to the bone, and get home in the evening too shattered to do all the things buzzing in tour heads.
Personally I have been bouncing between both, plus all the plans I had made at end of last year of where/what I wanted to achieve have hit some unexpected pot-holes in life’s road. And now I suspect I have been running on damaged wheels and a bent axel for a while and need to stop before I make it worse. Stopping. Not something I’m very good at.
While I am trying to figure out which way is ‘up’ on my personal map, I think the amount of stuff I can list will be someone reduced, along with my blogging output and input on some of the forums. Hopefully this will be just a temporary blip; a few health tonics, some early night, eating my greens, and trying to remember I am a mere human with aging swishy bits that don’t always work so well, then I can get back on course again. In the meantime a little of my dodgy artwork for you to look at, I should probably run a competition to see if you can figure out what it symbolises – but that’s just making work for myself again! See, I really am no good at stopping!
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Your wellbeing is at the core of your art and your craft (both the business and the making) so it has to come high in the priorities!
ReplyDelete(I sometimes feel very odd, as I'm one of a very small number of People Who Make Things, in that I don't want to make it a full time job. It'd be nice to only have a part time day job and more time to write, but 100% writing would result in nothing getting done and me getting crazy...)