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Keeping Busy
Nov. 21st, 2004 12:03 pmSome people deal with stress and anxiety by binge-eating, or by writing angsty poetry, or hiding inside a book or under the blankets until things start to resolve. I deal with stress by binge-crafting.
In the past week and a half, give or take, I have made baked potato soup, homemade applesauce, butterscotch-apple cake, applesauce bread, chocolate doom cake, chocolate-peanut-butter bundt cake, raspberry jam coffee-cake, and lemon-poppyseed muffins. I have put together a menu and shopping plan for Thanksgiving dessert, and have started brainstorming on my holiday cookie baskets. I have sewn most of a dress, crocheted about half a shawl, started knitting a pillow, and cross-stitched almost a third of a two-tiered photo frame. I have started researching and designing a headscarf to go with my Latvian garb for SCA events, and I have translated somewhere around thirty pages, possibly more, of a 16th-century Italian dance manual.
All of this is in addition to working full-time, going to SCA outings twice a week, getting back to work on the LARP programming for Arisia, keeping plugging away at thank-you notes, and going to Thursday's Sekrit Meeting. And it's still not enough, because I still have enough spare brain to think.
I've managed to reach a difficult balancing point. I can't start any new projects; I just don't have the space in the house or the money to buy supplies. But if I spend too much time on one thing, I'll finish it and have one less thing to work on; and even if I don't finish it, working on it eventually puts it into hind-brain activity and leaves me far too much thinking-space in the rest of my mind. So I flit about from project to project, leaving the house covered in a patchwork cloak of flour, note paper, scraps of yarn, and tag-ends of embroidery floss, and chastising myself for not actually accomplishing anything.
And I'm still worried. Maybe I need to make a baby afghan. I think I have enough scrap yarn for a multicolored project....
Or maybe I just need a nap.
In the past week and a half, give or take, I have made baked potato soup, homemade applesauce, butterscotch-apple cake, applesauce bread, chocolate doom cake, chocolate-peanut-butter bundt cake, raspberry jam coffee-cake, and lemon-poppyseed muffins. I have put together a menu and shopping plan for Thanksgiving dessert, and have started brainstorming on my holiday cookie baskets. I have sewn most of a dress, crocheted about half a shawl, started knitting a pillow, and cross-stitched almost a third of a two-tiered photo frame. I have started researching and designing a headscarf to go with my Latvian garb for SCA events, and I have translated somewhere around thirty pages, possibly more, of a 16th-century Italian dance manual.
All of this is in addition to working full-time, going to SCA outings twice a week, getting back to work on the LARP programming for Arisia, keeping plugging away at thank-you notes, and going to Thursday's Sekrit Meeting. And it's still not enough, because I still have enough spare brain to think.
I've managed to reach a difficult balancing point. I can't start any new projects; I just don't have the space in the house or the money to buy supplies. But if I spend too much time on one thing, I'll finish it and have one less thing to work on; and even if I don't finish it, working on it eventually puts it into hind-brain activity and leaves me far too much thinking-space in the rest of my mind. So I flit about from project to project, leaving the house covered in a patchwork cloak of flour, note paper, scraps of yarn, and tag-ends of embroidery floss, and chastising myself for not actually accomplishing anything.
And I'm still worried. Maybe I need to make a baby afghan. I think I have enough scrap yarn for a multicolored project....
Or maybe I just need a nap.
