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a pinterest fail

    Have you ever found something on pinterest and thought, “oh, I could make that! It looks so easy!” And then you actually try it and it is not at all easy?

    Yeah, me too.

    Usually this happens when I am looking for a fun craft to do with the kids.

    Like this one, for instance:

    The kids and I wanted to make a little something to give to their friends on the first day of school and what better than a bunch of rollos + a hershey kiss all bundled up to look like a pencil. Cute, right? And looks simple?

    Um, it was not.

    At one point Ryan called me upstairs for a gentle talking-to {“you wanted this to be fun, yes? It doesn’t sound like anyone is having fun”}. It got better once we figured out a system. And the kids LOVED giving these out to their friends. So it all has a happy ending, but it was a challenge getting to that point.

    Maybe I should have learned my lesson, but my sisters and their kids were coming over and we thought it would be fun to do a craft with the kids {all 9 of them}.

    I found this cute turkey pop and gathered the supplies. This time I was smart and tried an example first.

    That’s when we realized, this too would become a total pinterest fail if we included the kids.

    The turkey pop – while it is so cute and looks quite simple – was not!

    The oreos broke, the candycorn popped out, the eyeballs got wonky. If three fairly capable sisters couldn’t put these together, there is no way the kids would find this enjoyable.

    In the end, we scraped together one for each child and called it good.

    Our 30 minutes of hard work was consumed in about .2 seconds.

    The moral of the story: pinterest is pretty much amazing, but beware – some innocent-looking projects may make you want to never attempt another craft again. Or ingest an inappropriate amount of left-over double-stuffed oreos.

    Have you, too, had any pinterest fails?

    33 thoughts on “a pinterest fail”

    1. I have a board titled, “Pinterest lied to me”. I basically review pinterest ideas (recipes, crafts, or organizing tips) I’ve tried, hoping to let my followers know whether or not they’re worth the time.

    2. Thank you for sharing this. It’s nice to know that others have pinterest fails also. If it involves food, I call them delicious disasters when they don’t turn out like they should..and I have plenty of them :)

    3. Did you ever see the zombie hands Halloween treats? You fill a disposable plastic glove with popcorn and use candy corns as the finger nails. It is near impossible to get the candy corns in the right direction and you can forget getting the popcorn into the fingers! It took me two hours to make 25 of them, I was exhausted! All I kept saying was, “These children better LOVE these” lol I’ve also tried the ziplock bag butterflies. One side is grapes, the other is goldfish crackers separated by a clothespin to look like a butterfly. That is another I won’t ever do again :)

    4. Thank you for this – it made me laugh! It’s so refreshing to talk about how life is not perfect – we are always under so much pressure that it is important to realise that the fails are just as much fun, and as important in life, as the successes. I recently offered to make a surprise birthday cake for a good friend, even though I knew I would be pushed for time and had a busy week at work/looking after my toddler. I went straight to Pinterest, found the pink rose-covered cake (you know the one, right?!) and set to it. Three hours and lots of tears later, I scraped the mess of pink icing back into the bowl, added a dash of vodka, slapped it back on the cake any-old-how and shoved loads of those paper cocktail umbrellas into it to disguise the mess. Hey presto – a cocktail themed cake that looked great, tasted yummy, and went down a treat! And a one-off original too, not a Pinterest everyone-has-copied-it perfection. And that was just fine with the birthday girl!

    5. I have a pending Pinterest project that is bound to be a fail. It’s Martha Stewart’s paper mâché hot air balloon. I’m determined to have a red and white striped one hanging in my eldest daughter’s whimsical room, but it could be disastrous. We’ll see… Won’t somebody just sell me one??!

    6. I hear ya! I saw some pumpkins made from book pages at a craft fair and found some online as well. After taking HOURS to cut all of the pages, they were lopsided and roughly cut. Wish I had just spent the $12 for the ones at the fair :)

    7. LOL. I really can relate. I was going to decorate cookies for halloweens with my girls but decided to do it while they slept instead, and I was beyond frustrated, even with the ‘basic’ ones that only required sprinkles. I saw such beautiful sugar-skull cookies for the Day of the Dead, and was a fool to even try it. You can laugh at my pinterest fail here –>http://howsweetlifeis.com/2012/11/06/october-fun-halloween-update-and-more/. Thanks for “keeping it real”, Emily! xo

    8. I have to tell you- all of the honesty lately, about how real-life is and how things are not always easy or perfect….. it has been so refreshing. I wish more of my blog-idols would share the good, the bad, and the ugly.

    9. Yes, I have had a pinterest fail – but on the cooking front. I tried the Buffalo Califlower and as I was pouring a cup on buffalo sauce over the lovely roasted califlower I thought “this doesn’t seem right….” and I was right, it was a soggy mess!

    10. Um, yeah, I’m there with ya. Last year my friend and I had a Christmas Craft Day with our kids and tried to make Rudolph doughnut hole pops I saw on Pinterest. Epic fail. Even my friend and I couldn’t get them to look decent and we are both avid crafters! We still laugh about what a disaster it was…and a complete waste of materials, time and effort. Same goes for homemade gingerbread houses, even the graham cracker kind. This year I’ll stick with letting the kids decorate gingerbread man cookies and call it good! :)

    11. I love this …. made me laugh, feel affirmed because I have done the same thing and am not NEARLY as talented as you. Thank you for sharing this, I feel so normal now!!!

    12. Haha, this post made me laugh! I made a wreath last last year that looked so easy and quick… and while the finished product looks GREAT it took about 4x as long as I thought it would to make and it was pretty tricky to pull off.

    13. Even if the project did not turn out exactly like you hoped, your children were able to have an opportunity to share the excitement of first day of school with their friends!

    14. This very topic has been on my mind lately. Every time I use a recipe of of Pinterest, it does not turn out. i am an avid baker and cook, and for the most part I use cookbooks and trusted recipes. I find it so odd that the recipes I pin don’t seem to turn out. Kind of a bummer.

    15. Yes, me too! It was a really cute pencil vase. Sounds simple right? It was supposed to be a tin can with the pencils glued around it then tied with a pretty ribbon and stuffed with candy dipped oreos on skewers. I tried to glue the dollar store pencils but they didn’t fit around the can. Meaning that there was a gap when all were glued to the can. BIG FAIL! So I wasted 3 dollars worth of cheap pencils and over an hour of my life! And, um, the candy covered oreos weren’t that great either :(

    16. I like to disprove the science pins, like the glow in the dark Mt. Dew. That one is a total hoax. Also the glowing aura water xylophone, which just got the glow sticks wet.

    17. I made a Christmas gift last year for my sister that I found on pinterest – the nail art with string. Thank goodness for my wonderful husband because after putting the Texas on the board & the Double T for Texas Tech – he drilled the over 200 holes (yes, 200 +) and then I nailed & strung the string. In the end it turned out great & my sister loved it but I have to say it makes me look @ the crafting ideas a tad differently now.

      I think the turkeys turned out cute.

    18. I am lauging, because one of my managers actually sent these out to some of the employees with a note stating: “Thanks for being such a sharp employee.” These are adults sending this to other adults…I agree sometimes there are these cute ideas and when you sit down to try them at home… not so simple!

    19. Hi there! Just saw Giada At Home make these on her show and it looked like an easier version you might want to try! They are too cute to give up on! :D

    20. made ‘glow in the dark bubbles’ on our boat this summer for the kids (twilight boat ride) and it was a complete bust. the container of bubbles looked cool, and glowed, but when you blow the bubbles, you could not see them in the dark. we did however have fun with the remaining glow sticks, throwing them off the boat, and swimming to get them. they float, and are super easy to see in the water in the dark.

    21. I have had a lot of crafting fails with my kids. But I need to remind myself to take a deep breath and let go of the ultimate outcome. Who cares if the turkey has one eye? The kids honestly do NOT. They care about having a fun activity with family. I am a natural control freak, so this is a hard thing for me to do, but once you free yourself from expectations about having a picture perfect outcome, it is way more fun. And the kids can also express themselves creatively without feeling like they’ve failed to produce a perfect end result.

      Anyway, you’re not alone! And you’re a great mom for thinking up fun things to do with the kids!

    22. @Jen U, I love reading Pintrocity too! It is hilarious! My favorite one was all of the attempts to make those cookie ice cream bowls. Who knew it was so hard? Even so, I still LOVE Pinterest. It is one of my favorite pastimes :)

    23. You know those candy cornucopias using m&ms and sugar cones…big fail last year! The cones were supposed to be soaked on the ends to make them pliable so they could be rolled. It just ended up creating a sticky, gooey mess and most of them broke off. Ended up just putting the m&ms into the cones and calling it a day. My son was smart enough to abandon the project within the first 5 minutes and just leave me in there with my “fun” craft. HA!

    24. Glad you gave the warning – I had every intention of trying this with my students at school (I teach special education), but I have a feeling that would cause all sorts of meltdowns. :) They’re really cute, though!

      1. At cub scouts last night they had the kids make turkeys out of cupcakes. It was easy and so cute. frost a chocolate cupcake with chocolate frosting. Then stick on a head (a chocolate donut hole cut in half). The fan of the turkey was 5 candy corns stuck around the back of the cupcake. THen on the head they added a little frosting and a beak (a piece of candy corn) and two eyes (m&ms). Prepare for a sugar high though!

    25. I haven’t had any craft fails yet, but I’ve tried a few recipes that “pinners raved about” that we’re not so hot. And when you make a casserole or something for two adults and a 3 year old, there are leftovers that you must suffer with. :)

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