Never Say Never

I'm so weak.  I can't believe I caved like that!  Okay, I guess I should explain.

Almost two years ago a couple of my craftier friends asked me to join a social media site that they were using to get and share ideas for crafts, decorating, and all kinds of other stuff.  I had heard of it before, but I didn't see the benefit, and wasn't interested in having "one more website" to suck away my free time.  I was perfectly happy with *just* Facebook.

More and more of my friends and family use the site, and their cool finds keep popping up on Facebook, but still I held firm.  I did explored it a little bit, and I've used several ideas that I found there, but I've managed to stay on the outside looking in; borrowing ideas, but not "getting involved"...until this last weekend.

I don't know what came over me.  I was frustrated with my "system" for storing photos of ideas that I would like to try (creative storage, decorating, beading projects, stamping projects, etc.).  Some of my photos are printed and stored in a 3-ring binder...that I never look at and am loathe to update.  Some of my pictures are collected in Microsoft Word documents stored on my computer and never to be looked at again because they aren't organized.  And some photos are just stored as .jpg files...unlikely to be of any use because they aren't sorted in any kind of order or grouped with any logic.

I thought I would use a service that I'm already connected to; Shutterfly or Picasa, but something was missing - it was too...complicated.  And they really couldn't do what I was wanting to do.  So I researched photo storage and tools for organizing ideas.  Eventually I was brought back to the very site I had been resisting.

I was reluctant, but I typed in my standard bum e-mail address (it's legit, but goes directly to "trash") and registered.  I browsed around for awhile and the more I looked, the more I liked.  Eventually, I was pinning things on my own board...I was in.

It's been a few days now and I have pinned so much that one can only come to the conclusion that I am...a junkie.  But my inspirational photos are getting organized for the first time in twelve years, maybe even in my entire life.  They are organized in such a way that I can SEE them, be INSPIRED by them, and USE them.  Collecting photos for ideas and inspiration is no longer a wasted effort leading to more junk to organize.  It's just a website, and it's almost better than Facebook because there are no conversations.  I can search for ideas, pin my own, and go back to whatever I was doing.  It's much easier to not get sucked in by Pinterest than it is to not get sucked in by some waste-of-time conversation on Facebook.  It's a thin line, but so far I have managed to stay back from it.

If you'd like to see what I've been up to, visit me at Pinterest.