An Ode (or Whatever) to Pinterest

          O Pinterest! Dost thou know that I
          Covet those pins that catch'st mine eye?
          Verily, 'tis true that every pin
          Causes mine heart to leap with chagrin.
          I say chagrin -- for I cannot muster
          The moxie to create my own feather duster
          Or re-tile my kitchen with hand-painted ceramic
          Or bake a souffle (the thought makes me panic).
          [And yes -- I know that those words don't rhyme.
          Get off my back, Pinterest; I don't have time
          To hone my craft and polish my meter.]
          But I adore Constant Pinner and do long to greet her.
          She takes perfect photos; she wears perfect clothes;
          She know just what polish I should put on my toes.

                    Her house, her garden, her baby, her life
                    Are perfection. And if a teen gives her some wee bit of strife
                    I never will know.
                    Dog puke on the carpet? A burnt apple crisp?
                    A babe who says, "Fuck!" in an adorable lisp?
                    I never will know.

          But I say to Constant Pinner, "Bring it on, bitch!"
          I do love her photos! They give me an itch
          To craft, to re-finish, to weed, e'en to blog!
          And what are these pins after all, in this slog
          We call daily life, but a chance to dream
          And to vow to ourselves, though mad it doth seem,
          That we too might make curtains, or jelly, or quilts;
          That we might even make some DIY stilts.
          It could happen! Especially if my ways I mend . . .
          Oh, who am I kidding? So here I must end.

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Well, so here we are, approaching the season of Christmas once again.  I have found some terrific books for the Advent calendar again this year; I look forward to sharing them with you! The link will take you in most cases to Amazon, which will not benefit me in any way.

On this first day of December, here is a fun and fabulous book -- especially for a family with a fancy girl of their own! Fancy Nancy: Splendiferous Christmas is adorable and sparkly and fun to read. The illustrations are part of the fun, as Nancy prepares for a fancy Christmas, complete with decorations and a tree and gifts that she will prepare her very own self. When things go awry, trust Nancy to find a way to make Christmas festively fancy!

This is as crafty as it's going to get.

OK, so I am not a crafter.  I am not crafty at all, because hello -- when you're quilting or learning how to take pictures that are actually in focus or embroidering or re-finishing furniture or scrapping or developing your own film or designing jewelry, you are not reading.

I am a reader.  I am not a crafter.  But I did see some totally cute ideas for graduation gifts on Pinterest.

(Oh, my sweet Aunt Pat.  Pinterest.  I need to fan myself.  And I don't even have an Aunt Pat, but you know what I mean.)

And the crafty tasks looked somewhat do-able, if only because the writers made the [accurate] assumption that I am a crafting moron, so they talked me through the whole thing like they were kindergarten teachers.  Thank the Lord.

Well, so we have a friend who is off to Virginia Tech in the fall -- and she is so happy to be a Hokie which I don't get because  a hokie is a castrated turkey, but whatever.  Go, Hokies.

So I made her this ribbon board for her dorm room (and somewhere right now I just made a Residence Life professional cry into her gin, because they're not dorms.  They're residence halls.  I got a freaking master's degree in Student Affairs, and the one definitive take away I got from all that edifying was that they're not called dorms.  And no.  You can't have a ferret.)

The instructions for how to make the ribbon board came from a great yet demoralizing blog, 7 Layer Studio.  Shelley tricks you into thinking that she's just like you, and dang, isn't crafting hard for all us knuckleheads?  But take a look around her lovely blog, and you'll see that she's an artist.  And not in the hyperbolic way we talk about pretty blogs -- she's an artist artist.   Like, she makes art.  AND she redecorates her entire home for every holiday season.  I'm leaving out the part where she has three young children and she designs and makes all their clothes, and her husband is military, so they moved three times in the two hours that I was hypnotized into her blog.  It's exhausting just to look at the pictures, y'all.  When I got to the post where she laid a new slate and rock terracing system in her back yard -- moving all the stone herself -- I seriously had to decide whether I should just shoot myself because I suck so bad or go get another cup of coffee.  I picked the coffee.

And then I made the damned ribbon board thingy.

 

 

 

 

The other school organizer thingy I made came from Diane Henkler, a clever, clever DIY contributor to Momtastic.  This is a thing I will make again for myself -- and the girl in charge wants one for her dorm residence hall room, too.  It really is clever and just my speed -- because the secret ingredient is duct tape.  It anchors each of the layers of ribbon (as you attach them from the top down).  Brilliant!  I was too tired from reading Shelley's blog to take pictures of this project.  When I make it again I'll capture the moment or maybe not.

But I did torment myself a little bit more by going back to Shelley's 7 Layer Studio to follow this tutorial, which showed me how to make a festive as all get-out frou-frou bow to jazz up the organizer thingy.

 

I won't show you the step-by-step, because you can follow it on Shelley's blog just like I did (I literally sat in front of my computer, squinting anxiously at the screen to make sure I was doing it right).  She's pretty confident that I'm a moron, for which I'm grateful.

Still.  They're cute, aren't they? 

UPDATE:  Hey!  check this post out at: