Friday, July 28, 2006

bi-polar crafting?

sometimes i feel like i can't make up my mind about my hobbies... the issue i'm battling with right now is stamping... i was hot & heavy into stampin' up! products for a couple of years, and then scaled back big-time. for 6 or 7 months i hardly touched my stamps - except to sell off what i knew i was no longer wild about. then the new catalog came out in july, and all of that mania came rushing back to me. while my wishlist is far more modest than it has been in years past, i still wonder if it's just a phase.

we don't have a ton of extra money for launching my photography business, so i'm trying to be frugal in my acquiring the tools i need. i see my stamp collection as something of a gold mine - especially the retired stamps. after all - do i really need them? will i really use them?

and then there's the 'pending order'. i have a wishlist made up of the items i want to order all at once, totalling the minimum for hostess benefits, which would give me about $25-$30 in free product (a hostess stamp set and a set of my choice). it makes sense, if i'm going to order at all, to order in one lump sum, to get these extra benefits. and yet, i look at that sum of money and immediately think of the items i could use in my business - how much that would cross off my list.

do i really need more 'stuff'? in a culture that is consumed by it's 'need' for material things, do i really need to give into that temptation to accumulate stuff? i have a craft room full of hobby items, despite my hardy attempts to purge with some regularity, and quite honestly, i don't spend that much money on it anymore. where the heck does it come from?? so do i need to add to it with relatively more expensive investments?

see my dilemma??

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