Confession: I am addicted to blog hopping. I love to surf from blog to blog and have several that are in my Google Reader feed. Most of the blogs I cruise contain crafty ideas for things I’d love to do or make someday, I just don’t know when. However I’m always bookmarking specific blog posts of things I want to emulate.
About two years ago I had a fleeting thought (I was trying to clean out an overfull email account) about how wonderful it would be to have a clean way to organize all these URLs in a visually stimulating way so that I could quickly find specific projects I might want to “do now” when I had some time to be creative. Like many of my thoughts, it floated away because I did not have the time, energy, or technical know-how to accomplish such a task. How very funny that around that time Pinterest got a start. I was not part of the beta test group but I did start hearing about it sometime in 2010. Then, when it became open to others to use, just by requesting an invite, I was very excited to try it out. Imagine my dismay to find out you had to be on Facebook or Twitter to join. Not that I am opposed to either Facebook or Twitter – I just hadn’t joined either of them because I was worried about how much time I might find myself wasting on these sites. I hemmed and hawed for weeks over what to do until I realized that all that time I was worried about wasting, was already being used enjoyably by feeding my blog hopping habit and attempting to keep ideas/projects/etc. organized. So I caved in and joined Twitter just so I could accept my Pinterest invitation. There have been zero regrets since.
As for me on Pinterest? Well, I’m still slowly migrating all those saved ideas from my hard drive to my Pinterest account. Until that project is complete, I’m trying really really hard to not do too much surfing inside the Pinterest site. But boy do I find some lovely ideas every time I open it up and some of them do end up on my own boards. Now if I could just find the time to tear myself away from the boards long enough to actually create some of the items I’m pinning I’d feel just a little bit better about the time I’m spending enjoying the service. (The flip side of that statement is that living vicariously through others has always been a weakness of mine – which might be why I have more fun finding things to do than actually doing them – how’s that for honesty?)
Ben and Team – thanks for creating a place for me to keep all my ideas organized and indulge my dreams! Happy Pinning indeed.
