Sleeping babies, the IRS and creative time

The good news … at nine-months-old Angela has started to go to sleep and stay asleep at the same time every night. And her bedtime is a full three hours before my bedtime, which means plenty of time to do whatever I want.

The bad news … I’ve been spending the majority of that time doing the books for the blog. In 2014, after years and years of blogging, this little endeavor of mine made enough money to go from hobby, to business in the eyes or the IRS. Awesome, exciting and terrifying for someone who has never balanced a checkbook.

I could tell by February of last year I was going to need to turn this blog into a legitimate business and figured I would have plenty of time to do that on maternity leave. Ah the delusions of a first-time mother. It was November before I finally created an LLC, and January before I started the labor intensive process of manually imputing all my income and expenses into QuickBooks. A process that could have been avoided completely if I would have just bought accounting software and connected it to my bank account and PayPal at the beginning of last year. You should take note of that last sentence if your creative endeavors are also starting to make you some money.

But my marathon accounting nightmare is over, I don’t owe a million dollars to the IRS and I feel quite official with an employer identification number, lawyer and accountant.

And since all my ducks are in a row, that means I finally get three hours a night to do creative projects, like finish the February Calypso Kaleidoscope blocks, cut the next size up of cloth diapers in fun new girly prints because Angela grew out of hers overnight and write a whole lot more blog posts for you all to read.

I’m also working on a super top secret project that hopefully will be revealed next month. It is part of a very informal, not even written down business plan to help continue to grow Quilt Addicts Anonymous so I can continue to bring you quilting tutorials, new patterns and giveaways. Then maybe someday Quilt Addicts Anonymous will be big enough that I can turn it into my day job instead of the thing I do after the baby goes to sleep.

But in the meantime, the rest of this week’s evenings will be spent getting the March Block of the Month tutorial ready for you all.

What are you all working on and how do you find time in the day for your creative projects?