Sunday, June 7, 2009

Falling behind and catching up

I haven't posted in a long time and I could give any number of reasons for that. Both my kids had birthdays in the last 30 days, I had major house cleaning, I had nothing doll related to post about, stress, etc, etc. Probably the biggest reason for not posting is having nothing interesting to write about and being too tired to see at the end of most days. Not that I have been overwhelmingly busy, but I do have problems when the seasons change. Some people get seasonal depression and I guess you could give that name to what happens to me, but I don't get depressed. I get tired and unmotivated. I wake up tired and then have to run around keeping up with the kids, the house, planning birthday parties, my wedding, etc. But I promise this is not going to be a long post complaining about my life. I like my life very much.
I seem to have fallen into the trap that many artists in the hobby fall into. Though I am technically not an artist but a crafts person. I am OK with that, I can take a picture (of a doll) out of my head and make it real in miniature. I am finally realizing that not everyone can do that (or sew in 1:9 scale) so I am pretty proud to be a decent crafts person. But anyway, I have fallen into the trap of overbooking my time, falling behind and then slowly losing my mind.
Because I think I am slowly losing my mind.
I thought I had parcelled out my time pretty well. I would not book more than 2 dolls in any one week. That should have given me plenty of time to get the dolls done. But when there are wedding and horse shows (plural) to plan and birthday parties....time is all of a sudden a hot commodity. And then of coarse there is the fact that there is prep work before attending a live show. So the week (or at least several days) before a show is devoted to making sure tack, props and horses are not in need of repair, everything is clean, packed safely, etc. Between all the things that I have had to do recently (and the lack of motivation and being abnormally tired) I am not surprised I was falling behind.
So now the catching up. I am not catching up just yet but I am working on it. The other day I prepped several youth doll bodies (see my blog on youth dolls for full details) today I haired a pile of heads, glued hems on coats, cut fabric and so on. I have not worked towards finishing one doll today but several. It may or may not be more efficient but I have found that mixing up the way I do things once in awhile keeps them from getting boring. Every doll is unique but after making more than 100 dolls some of them are very similar to each other.
I won't try to guess at when I will be all caught up but I will keep working on chunks of doll chores at a time. I think I will do some more fabric cutting tonight (now if I could just find where I put that other bag of fabric we would be getting somewhere) and then maybe tomorrow will be a big sewing day. And if that (happens and) goes smoothly I will probably glue more hems. Boot day, whenever that happens, will not be my favorite day by a long shot. I love the all leather boots and think they are far superior to plastic boots, but they are somewhat time consuming and very dull. But I hate plastic boots so leather it is.
Sorry there is no picture today, I couldn't think of what would fit in with this blog (besides a picture of mangled youth doll bodies and a pile of heads) and didn't have anything prepared. Hopefully soon I can think of something interesting to write about having to do with the interesting world of doll making. If anyone has any suggestions I would love to hear them :)