In 2016 I’ve resolved to do more writing and more creative crafts (to use up my craft supplies, recycle, and keep my brain alive). I’ve taken Twitter off my mobile devices to help me steer time toward those endeavors.
Sounds like a great plan, right? Yeah. But as my friends at Freakonomics say: There’s a hidden cost to everything. Twitter off my mobile devices has only led me to a deeper commitment to Pinterest. Honestly I think Twitter was better for me because Twitter is the mostly harmless deadly sin of Pride, whereas Pinterest is greed, lust, envy and gluttony combined. Pinterest’s dark underbelly leads one down time-sucking dark alleys from which I may never return. I will recount for you my latest foray in a minute.
It’s a time-suck but the whole idea of Pinterest is endlessly amusing. Hope springs eternal in each and every post. And the results are hilarious. Nothing on the Web makes me laugh more than “Nailed it” pics – the before/after results of picture-perfect Pinterest projects and their poor reproductions by mere mortals. Seriously, I *CRY* laughing at these pics.
Click on the pic to see some of the fecking funniest “Nailed it” pics in history
At my funeral, I want you all to play a slide show not of my life but of the best of the worst of these testimonies to the eternal – and confounding – power of HOPE.
OK. Back to my latest Pinterest Project.
As I said, I’m trying to recycle what I have in the house, as opposed to bringing new materials in for craft projects. Having two children has led to an extraordinary large build-up of crayons. So I thought I’d do this:
Simple!
Read on to see what really happened. (This post was banged out angrily late at night on Facebook. My friends mocked me, as that’s what friends do. See? The Pinterest amusement is a gift that keeps on giving.)
Gettin’ Real up in Pinterest Valentine’s Day
- Collect all the broken crayons in the house (send any decent ones to a teacher for her classroom).
- Soak the crayons in water to dissolve the paper wrappers (Make sure you take out all the “washable” crayons. Those will just disintegrate into glops of gooey goo).
- Separate by color (after you scratch the paper off each one, because soaking won’t work), then break up into pieces.
- Melt them in the oven in a silicon Ikea heart ice cube mold. Follow temp and time directions found online.
- Realize people online are idiots and/or my oven sucks. Increase oven temp by 10%. Increase baking time by 400%.
- Open all the doors and windows and run every fan in the house. In the dead of winter. Because: stankage.
- Repeat 3 times. The mold has 16 hearts. You have a shit ton of crayons.
- Struggle like you’ve never struggled before. Break 2 hearts in the process of extracting hearts from mold.
- Try a microwave experiment.
- Go back to using the oven.
- Struggle like hell again to get the crayons out, after sufficient cooling time.
- Days pass. You are still working on this.
- Ignore complaints of crayon smell in the dining room.
- Son tells you he isn’t planning on handing anything out for Valentine’s day at school.
- SOLDIER ON. You still have more crayons to melt.
- Add more crayons to each heart halfway through melting process. This produces huge hearts that don’t match the rest but it gets it all done faster.
- Search around for a box to hold 44 heart crayons.
- Do unnatural things to cardboard for display purposes in box.
- Stuff crayons in the box even though they don’t really fit.
- Spend 4 days trying everything to save the $1 mold from Ikea then eventually toss it in the recycling bin.
VOILA! Crayon hearts from Pinterest. That are taking up space in your house.
NAILED IT.
