It is a mistake to suppose that people succeed through success; they often succeed through failures. ~Author Unknown
It's no secret that I'm a Pinterest Junkie. And by that I mean I usually spend a few hours once a week just looking at things on Pinterest, or pinning things from the net to Pinterest. I love the organization of it - being a Virgo, it's what I'm all about. A semblence of order in the chaos.
I still have piles of notes and stickies with my ideas or doodles or thoughts scattered through-out my life, but I will say the volume is reduced because I "pin" now. And I use One Note, which is like organizer crack. You will create projects just so you can use one note to its full capability.
Anyhow, I've tried a few things from the crafty world that I've found on pinterest, and the moral of the story is this: think it through. If the picture looks good and the guidance seems easy to follow than give it a shot, but don't let that replace your common sense.
Here is one I think is a great examples of a good idea gone wrong because I simply didn't think it through:
Painted Halloween pumpkins. Not carved, painted. I started "pinning" ideas that inspired me and I planned to have about 10 in the store that would be the hit of October. Now, here's where painting the pumpkins went wrong:
A few days after I finished the first one, I picked it up to move it to take a picture outside. And several of the letters done in puffy paint literally fell off. Even with a clear coat, the life of the puffy paint and the glitter glue adhering to the pumpkin was about three days.
Next year, no puffy paint or glitter glue. I think crayon and clear coat is going to remain the winner. Now, if I had simply thought this through I would have never dreamed of putting these two things on a live gourd shell. Intuitively, I would have said to myself, it will never set up. But since it was pinterest, and the picture was pretty I ignored common sense.
Second warning - acrylic paint will drip on a fresh gourd (pumpkin) long after it should. It just doesn't set up like you would expect. Hours after I painted the word "BOO" on a pumpkin in acrylic, it dripped. Now - this unexpected result worked out well in this case, because it looked like the 'o's were bleeding eyes. But for next year, I will have to remember this.
Here's the biggie: Now, I've been on the planet for more than 45 years now. I know what the shelf life of a pumpkin is. Clear coat preserves many things, but not the shelf life of a pumpkin.
So, after about 5 weeks, these pumpkins that I (thankfully) never put in the store to sell due to their flaws are starting to show signs of death. A strange green mossy/moldy substance is now creeping out of the paint, tumours seem to be appearing from the gourd that weren't there before I painted it (essentially sealing up it's living shell).
This morning I received a distress call from Dewey. He is working on a set of chairs for a customer at our home. He wanted to move the pumpkins so that his finishes wouldn't land on them. It seems that the stem popped off the first one he moved. And his very sensitive nose was assaulted by a smell he tried to described, but I stopped him.
Biggest lesson: painting a pumpkin for Halloween in early September is a bad idea. The pumpkin will rot before the big day. Thankfully, the other artists at EarthWorks have more sense than me. We still have some great ceramic lights with ghosties and scarecrows and skulls, and some great hand painted towers for the house. We also still have 3 Erin Ewer masquerade half masks and a neato wand for your costume!
I'm happy to be able to share my failures with you. Next time I might tell you about the wine bottle/christmas light fire hazard. Or trying to wrap a feather around a styrofoam ball. Or the photo box out of an old cardboard box and duct tape. I love my pinterest experiments.
PL&BB-
Penni
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