What I learned from Pinterest...

Sometimes Pinterest gets a bit of a bad rap.  It seems that there are a significant amount of people who think it's nothing more than lady porn - looking at pretty food, pretty rooms, pretty vacations and some pretty men.  I'll admit there is something to that criticism.

It's interesting to look at the main page of Pinterest.  It's a little like being able to glimpse the psyche of the collective women of the world.  Besides recipes, jewelry, clothes and wedding ideas, there are a fair amount of body anxiety, inspirational thoughts and snarky commentary on the world that women inhabit.  A women is somewhat likely to pin a photo of the perfect chocolate chocolate chip cookie two seconds after she pins the photo of the girl with washboard abs with some slightly anorexic (pro-ana) sentiment attached to it.  There's nothing quite like Pinterest to expose the borderline psychotic relationship with have with food and exercise.

We want it all.  We want our cake and our abs.  We want Ryan Gosling and that JCrew jacket.  We want great hair and a vacation in the Maldives.  We will pin the photo of the Chanel nail polish, even though we know that in the end we probably won't want to spend $30 on a bottle of it, when we can get Essie on sale at Walgreens.

But I would argue this is kind of a good thing about Pinterest.  Pinterest gives us a chance to explore the possibilities.

But Pinterest has also given me a lot of great ideas - things I've actually used, things I've made, things I've cooked.  I actually think it's been a pretty positive thing for me.  It organizes my thoughts and my desires in a way that I never was able to do before.

Here are things I actually made or did in the past few months because of Pinterest:

Yesterday we made 5 of these for Jordan.  5 in one day and I don't sew!  Thanks to a great tutorial on pinterest. 

This is a genius idea.  I went to the Container store and got a big jar to put in the fridge.  Right now it has Watermelon and Rosemary water in it.  Such a delicious way to make your own nearly calorie free vitamin water! 

I used a lot of the ideas I saw on pinterest for the wedding open house.  

These did not work out this way and we ended up going with regular cotton candy, and separately passing out glow sticks.  But it's a cool concept. 

Bought some of these after seeing this photo and remember how much I've always loved them.

Made a TON of these.  Turned out really well and super cool.  

Delicious and very healthy!

Yeah, he's super cute.  But it got me to look up info on him, find out that he had a british tv show that I'd never seen, and I'm still catching up with the episodes on netflix.  I really like the show - LUTHER.  

Good, but next time I'm making them bigger (lemon monkey bread)

This is my family's newest favorite.  Seriously, my crock pot doesn't make enough of this.

Everyone really liked this too.  I'll definitely be making it again.  

Perhaps this pin going around sums it up better than anything else:

If you want to follow my pins, or find out the original source of the pins I blogged about here, you can find me on pinterest here:  http://pinterest.com/bandanamom/