Balance

Me working on an embroidery project

Last night I finished a big project I have been working on. When it gets to where it is going, I will show you pictures and tell you more about it. But last night I finished.

I thought it would take me longer to finish and was worried it wouldn't be finished on time. Surprisingly to me, I finished with time to spare.

There's a huge amount of relief and pride in finishing a project. It's not perfect, people will know it was handmade for sure. Despite that, I can step back and be proud of it and feel pretty accomplished for making it.

It's also a bit sad that it's done. That was a lot of time and a lot of work. I suppose it's a bit like the post-Christmas blues. This project has consumed me, I've stayed up later than I should on more than one occasion. And yet, it has to end at some point, because if it trailed on forever, it would make me crazy. I'd get frustrated and walk away and maybe pick it back up in a couple of years.

I know. Because I might have more than one project laying around that has been laying around for more time than they should be.

So I finished the project, but quickly moved on. I've already started different projects - crafty and organizational. I'm half-way through a crochet blanket. I began organizing (tagging, deleting the bad ones, captioning, etc) my digital pictures. And at the start of this year, I decided this was the year to tackle all those half-finished, laying around, feeling forgotten about projects. Well, okay, I probably won't finish all of them, but I do plan to finish some of them.

I'm trying to limit the number of new projects I start to help me get to the end of the other projects. But there are always new projects to start, new tasks to tackle, new ideas that excite me - that grab hold of me and make me want to start right this very minute!

It's all about the balance - balancing the new with the old, balancing the time spent on these projects with the time spent with my family, cleaning, being at base/softball games, and the other million things that I should be doing daily (even though I don't always), so many thing to balance. I'm not good at all that balancing. I'm both literally and figuratively bad at balance. But I plod along, doing the best that I know how to do. Because at the end of the day, that's all I can do.