Having a hobby is hard work!

I've mentioned before that people often are amazed that I have time to have a hobby that I participate in consistently. Usually, I'm not amazed. It's just what I do at night instead of watching TV (or while watching TV if I must be entirely honest). However, sometimes I'm left without any time to spin yarn or play with wool and just finding 5 minutes to label some yarn is a challenge.

Let me be the first to say (or maybe the 2nd to say) that having a hobby can be hard work. Okay, perhaps having a hobby that produces some income is hard work. Producing income is not an occasional thing. We're not having a yard sale one weekend and bringing in $800. I'm relying on my hobby to pay for itself and make a profit at the same time. You can't do that with one weekend a year. A hobby like this takes time, daily, to keep up and sometimes that time just isn't there.

I've struggled in the past two weeks to find time to spin, card batts, and work on jewelry like I've been planning to do since January. This isn't a "Man, I have to spin yarn but don't want to" kind of thing, this is a "Man I want to spin yarn but the laundry/day job/garden prep/paying bills is getting in the way" kind of thing.

Perhaps someone needs to make a public service announcement. It might go something like this: "Attention ______ residents: There are new findings to support that having a hobby is not a luxury - it's a burden. If you have, at any time, purchased a lot of craft supplies only to have them go sitting in your closet, unused, because of something that Martha Stewart made look easy, please call J. Craft, Craft, and associates as you may be entitled to a large cash settlement".

I hate to use the word burden, but really, isn't it? I fill up a room in my house with my income producing hobby only to apologize for the fuzzy mess when I have guests that need to stay in my craft, no make that, guest room. I spend hours organizing my beads at my jewelry table just to make the back room neat enough to vacuum. I'm often burning an entire dinners worth of calories just toting my spinning wheel and baskets of wool around my house to find a good, sunny spot to spin yarn in. Hah, and you thought I did this for fun!

Well, you thought right. I love it. I love my little income producing burden, eeek, I mean hobby. When I complain that I had to clean up my wool room, secretly, I'm bragging that I got to spend hours documenting all of the fiber I've acquired. My fiber room and jewelry making spaces are to me what the big money bin in Ducktails was to Scrooge McDuck. They are a symbol of my wealth. I'll never say it's easy to keep up my hobbies, but I'd shudder at the thought of not having hobbies to keep up with.