Pinterest Fail #1

After a few Pinterest successes, I am now sad to report my first Pinterest fail.  Over a month ago, I tried this.  It seemed like a cute idea for a Christmas gift and I was excited because of people who had left a comment on Pinterest saying how awesome it was to get something from a Disney princess.  A month has now passed and I haven't heard one peep from Disney.... perhaps Christmas is just too busy for them.  Or perhaps my first suspicions were correct-- that Tinkerbell is just some unofficial princess so they just toss letters to/about her.

Good thing I didn't tell my niece about this...... I would have never heard the end of it.

Christmas Gifting

I don’t consider myself a ‘cheap’ person when it comes to Christmas gifts.  I like to try and be a little creative- which for me is HUGE.  So when I saw this idea on Pinterest I wasn’t thinking, aha! Cheap gift!  I was thinking more thoughtful things about the married people in my family- my mom and dad, and my sister and her husband.  At first I was going to do this for my mom and dad.  But they’ve been married for over 26 years- and I couldn’t really see them writing mushy love notes to each other.  It would either get lost, broken, forgotten about, or used as a “honey-do” from my mom that my dad would claim he can’t read because he doesn’t have his contacts in.  Plus, I don’t think she would be able to read my dad’s handwriting if he used a dry erase marker.  (It’s tough to read when he’s writing very neatly on a lined piece of paper using blue or black ink).  So after that long (and rather boring) thought process, that left my newlywed sister- a soon to be journalist- and brother in law- a teacher.  Bingo!  What a winning combination!  They are new and all in love and stuff so I thought this would totally work for them! 

Luckily for me, it was easy as pie to put together and only took about ten minutes.  (Notice my attention to detail- I wrote the note following the lines exactly- it was hard!)  And the cost was low as well.  The hardest part by far was trying to figure out what kind of frame to use.  I thought silver goes with anything.....right?!  And if worse comes to worse, they can just replace it with a frame they like better/matches more/looks more crafty.   I probably should have tried to follow the pinterest thing a little more closely- done something in wood, added felt flowers, aged the paint.  But let's be honest- it's better for non crafty people to stick to the basics until we get the hang of things.  Then perhaps we can branch out later.

The reaction to the present was my favorite part.  My brother-in-law, "Uh, thanks Jenny....." not really sure what was going on, and my sister, bless her, at least acting more interested/excited about it.  But since he doesn't get too excited about things not related to Aggie sports I didn't take it personal.

Christmas Treat!

This was my first (but hopefully not last) foray into COOKING….. an ominous topic to me and to anyone that knows me.  I picked this particular recipe for several reasons- first, the picture looked pretty and very Christmas-y.  Second, there were only five ingredients-

 

Also, I didn’t have to use a pot or a stove- a very big plus to someone who can’t cook.  I was more nervous when I read the directions…. As any fellow non-chef knows, unfamiliar equipment in recipe directions causes lots of anxiety (even more so, sometimes, than unfamiliar ingredients).  Most of the time, this anxiety is caused because we don’t know how to substitute things.  We go by the book, but if the book is too vague or confusing, we are lost and frustrated.

And speaking of being lost and frustrated…. I almost gave up on this whole Idea because of one little ingredient…. Peppermint extract.  I have never used ‘extract’ of anything, but figured it would be in the spice or baking isle.   It was nice things were alphabetized, but after going over the row again and again….. mint extract, orange extract, root beer….. I couldn’t find any of the right extract!  So I left to find the almond bark cause I thought that would be hard to find.  It actually wasn’t, but did you know they have chocolate flavored almond bark??  Weird… Anyway, back to the extract isle.  I was getting mad that I couldn’t find any freaking peppermint extract.   I grabbed some almond extract (why not?) and some vanilla extract (only because I think I’ve heard of that one before) to see if I could try substituting.  Then I remembered that I was doing this only to see if it was possible for someone like me to do it, and figured I shouldn’t give myself the additional  handicap of trying to fake an ingredient.  So I went back to the row and started pushing things out of the way.  Lo and behold, BEHIND the orange extract (duh) was the peppermint extract!  Ah, sweet success. 

So, back to the recipe.  In this recipe she said she crushes stuff in a food processor.  That’s like a fancy blender, right?!   I’m almost positive somewhere in my house is a food processor (my roommate is an amazing cook) but since I wouldn’t know the difference between that and a regular blender, I stuck with old fashioned crushing- I stuck the candy canes in a big baggie and took a rolling pin-like thing and crushed the heck out of the candy.  Actually, it reminded me of crushing pills at the hospital, just on a bigger scale, so it wasn’t too bad.  I do recommend putting something under the bag though…. Those candy canes can be sharpish and little holes in the bag = pretty red and white dust on the counter.  And she is not kidding when she says to use the biggest bowl you have.  It was so hard to mix everything together!  I tried moving the stuff from one bowl to another.... that didn't work very well.  So I dumped it all on the counter (after putting wax paper down, of course) and tried mixing it with my hands (after washing them really really well).  That worked!  If I did this again, I think I would put half the popcorn in the bowl, then cover that with half the other ingredients, then top it with the rest of the popcorn and the rest of the other stuff.  Maybe that would make it easier to mix.

Yum!  Cooling on the wax paper....



My finished product



VS.



The website finished product



See the difference??  I used the amount of Oreo they said to, but hers looks like it has a TON more Oreo.  Or maybe I did a little too well during the crushing stage...

In the end, it cost less than $20 and I spent less than an hour doing everything, including clean up and dishes!

It was really fun and I recommend this pinterest link to anyone!

Disney Part 1

One entry on Pinterest claims that if you write a letter to a character at Disney they send you an autographed photo back---Can you blame me for being a skeptic about this one?  They must get hundreds of letters every single day!  (And please don't judge me for picking something easy for my first go around-- we'll save the harder stuff for later...)

Actually, I saw this just in time- I figured at least 20 days is long enough to get a letter back (if this really happens) and my niece loves Rapunzel and Tinkerbell.  Do they really get back to every single person?  Hopefully, I’ll have my answer before the new year.  (According to Wikipedia-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_Princess, Tinkerbell is an 'unofficial princess'.... so maybe they just get back to people who write to the 'official' princesses.....)

I mailed the letters this afternoon, (Friday, December 2nd)- to Tinkerbell & Rapunzel.  Besides the paper and envelopes I just had laying around, the cost of this adventure? A whopping $0.88 (2 stamps).  If this really works, it could be the best, cheapest present ever.  I mean really, who remembers the presents they got when they were four?

If you want to try this before I find out if it really works, here's the address: Walt Disney World Communications PO Box 10040 Lake Buena Vista, FL 32830-0040  (I added an ATTN: insert princess name here to my letters to make them seem cooler? More legit?  Is 'legit' even a word people use anymore?!)

Introduction

I’m the least crafty, least artsy, least creative person I know.  I can’t really cook, paint, draw, put things together, stay organized…. Well you get the idea.  Some of you may have heard of a little site called Pinterest.  No?  Well then I won’t encourage you to check it out because it is quite possibly the most addicting thing you will ever encounter.  In the last several weeks as I have wasted countless hours on that site, looking at amazing food, clothing, hair dos, ways to tie a scarf, etc one thing that I have constantly thought about is this—is that REAL?!  I mean, it has been pinned from some random site by some random person….. but even with all our technology (hello photoshop) it can’t be totally fake, right?!  I wonder can a regular person actually do/make/organize/work out in the way they show us?  Maybe the reason these things look anywhere from fake to impossible is because I am so non crafty/artsy/creative.  However, according to a quote I found on Pinterest, “Nothing is impossible.  Even the word has I’m Possible in it.”

Can a regular person really do the impossible, crazy, creative things on pinterest?  Or is it just another place we look at, feeling guilty that we aren’t doing more creative things to raise our children (how can I feel guilty about this… I don’t even HAVE any), and wishing we had enough talent to change empty toilet paper rolls into something beautiful for the home.  Well, I guess I'm about to find out.

Leave a comment and let me know what you think of this idea…. Perhaps it’s a project that will be doomed to fail from the beginning....