I must confess something. I am an addict. I am addicted to Pintrest. I have lead to the addiction of hundreds if not dozens of others. I don’t just pin things that I think are cute and interesting. If it’s a DIY (Do-It-Yourself, duh), I try it. If it’s a hairstyle, I experiment with it. If it’s interior decorating, I dream about it, because mom would kill me if I tore up the house in the pursuit of all things cute.
If you don’t know how the website works, let me break it down for you. In the olden days (when our parents were in school and rode the brontosaurus bus to school), teachers used things called bulletin boards. They were made of corkboard and you could use sharp, little pins to hold things in place. This website takes that concept and makes it virtual. You can make as many boards as you want, all with different themes. Some of the most common include food, clothes, makeup, wedding ideas, babies and animals.
When you open the homepage, you might be a little overwhelmed at first. You’re bombarded with pictures upon pictures upon pictures of the most random things. As you scroll down, you’ll hear yourself going “oh, that’s cute. That’s funny, that’s cool. I wish I could do that.” Welcome to your new addiction. These little pictures are called ‘pins.’ You don’t have to make an account to look at them, but if you want to add them to your own boards, you do. It can take up to two weeks to get your Pintrest invitation after you request it, so be patient, my crafty friends. Yeah, to make an account, you have to be ‘Invited.’ This is nothing special, it’s just a way for the makers of the site to keep the site from crashing. They have to make the available space on the site larger so more people can join. You have to request an invitation before you can join, and you should receive an e-mail when you can join.
Every time you refresh the page, new things come up. If you see something you like, click the picture. It will then open a larger version of the picture. If it’s a craft or hairstyle or recipe that you might be interested in learning how to recreate, click the picture again and it should take you to the source of where it was originally ‘pinned’ from. If you’d like to save the idea for later, don’t forget to ‘repin’ it to one of your own boards so that you can get back to it.
How do new things get added to the site, if you just ‘repin’ old things? Well my dears, there’s this fancy thing called the ‘pin it’ button. When you get your account set up, it gives you the option to add the ‘pin it’ button to your toolbar. Say you’re surfing the web and you see something that makes your ROFL IRL. You want to share it with the world. Just click the ‘pin it’ button and it will be added to whichever of your boards you so choose.
Don’t like seeing all the random things? Up at the top of the screen, it gives you the option to change the category you can see. It varies from animals, to fashion, from food to fitness. No matter what interests you, there is a pinboard for it.
This website makes me feel inspired to do things, create things, repurpose things. And most importantly, it has given me a mission – to make the world sparkly.
