Winter Pinteresting Finds

Pinterest is an amazing tool! For the most part, I am really good about not getting sucked into it. I try to use it practically, especially for food. Here are some favorites and a not-so-favorite this winter:

Thumbs-up Finds:

Crusty Bread: This really was so easy and so delicious. My problem would be remembering to make it in the morning so that it's ready by supper. Also, you have to make sure that you bake it long enough or the insides will be a little undone. But it was fabulous!

Bite-sized Greek appetizers: Little bites of deliciousness. I made these for my friend Donna's 40th birthday bash and people gobbled them up. I made half with olives and half without. I am a big fan of olives, but next time I'll leave them off since the non-olive ones were devoured much faster. Very easy to make.

Gumbo: This is a fantastic gumbo recipe that I discovered when I had sausage and shrimp and not much else in the refrigerator. I didn't have chicken or okra, and I used a few tablespoons of tomato paste instead of stewed tomatoes. It was perfect.

Candle in a tea cup: My daughter and her friends always exchange Christmas gifts, and lately they've been challenging each other to make rather than buy gifts. I thought her tea-cup candles were adorable! She bought most of the tea cups at thrift stores.

Writing prompts. I am a collector of writing prompts, but this is a particularly original site filled with hundreds of ideas. I used this extensively for this semester's journal assignments.


Meh:
Boston Cream Poke Cake: I made this for myself for my birthday. I know! It really isn't as bad as it sounds. Both my husband and daughter offered to make my cake but our timing was just weird that day. It was good, but not amazing. I probably won't make it again.


Thumbs-down:

Spicy Whole Roasted Cauliflower. Ew. This has been all over Pinterest and Facebook, and I have no idea what everyone is raving about. We love cauliflower at our house—but not this way! Give me roasted cauliflower with olive oil and sea salt any day. The spices were overpowering, and the cauliflower was undercooked, even though I roasted it for an extra 15 or 20 minutes.

My top three most often pinned posts:
What College Profs Wish Freshmen Knew
Ultimate Guide to Creative Writing Resources for Students
 SmallWorld's WordSmithery: Free Creative Writing Lessons



Come and see how other bloggers at iHomeschool Network are using Pinterest this summer! You can link up your own flips and flops there, too. And if you don't already, be sure and follow me on Pinterest for food, homeschooling, great books, travel, and decorating stuff, too!

Putting Pinterest to Use: Synonym Wheels

I originally saw the idea for a synonym flower or wheel or sun pinned from Hello Literacy. There weren't any directions there, but this is not a difficult project! The hardest part was stuffing my purse with the paint sample cards. I felt like a shoplifter, even though I know these are perfectly acceptable to take!

 

The idea is to put a common word, like "happy," at the bottom (or top, depending on the direction) and then find synonyms for that word. We actually all did this together as a family, although I intended to do it just with my 5th-grader. Everyone just happened to be around and kept yelling out words. This would be a great learn-to-use-the-thesaurus activity as well.

This was an incredibly easy and fun project, and we now have it brightening up our schoolroom. I really intend to do it with my creative writing classes, but 24 kids X 9 paint cards each is a whole lot of paint cards in my purse! (Yes, I know they will probably just actually give them to me at Lowe's or Home Depot.) I meant to write in the middle, "Instead of _____, Use ______" but I forgot and wrote "synonyms" instead. The idea, of course, is that instead of using the same old words over and over again, such as "awesome" or "nice," you can have a choice of sooo many others!

Isn't Pinterest an amazing resource? How have you used your Pinterest ideas this week?

 

Putting Pinterest to Use: Newspaper Blackout Poems

I've seen this link to newspaper blackout poems pinned dozens of times, have you? So of course we had to try. Give my 11-year-old a black Sharpie and tell him to scribble things out, and he's all for it.

We took a newspaper article with "music" in the title, because that looked way more promising than one that said "voters" and "election" in it. We started circling promising words, crossing out names and dates, and then eventually began to see exactly how our poem was going to come together:

Music is my own family

Love taken,
put into practice

a bit of familiarity
folk and bluegrass and country…

We had so much fun making this project! My daughter came in as we were finishing and said she was eager to do one of her own. She did point out that when we blocked out the columns, the poem read differently than we intended it to. Next time, we'll leave the columns! But here is our final poem in its entirety:

Music is
my own family.
Love taken,
put into practice.

A bit of familiarity,
folk and bluegrass and country,
blues and funky soulful stuff.

Be careful—
it's hard for people.
This
really feels
right: in pursuit,
surrounded
by my own voice.

Together,
harmonies so close.

A lifetime began,
hoping on stars.
Only sing:
I am.

Linked up with Pinterest Monday

Chair Redo

My great room redo started back in November, when I began turning Duncan's old bedroom into our office. First I painted the walls; I then painted an old lab table and spruced up a dresser. I've cleaned the carpets, added new curtains and a window bench, and started organizing the cabinets.

It was time for the chair.

I've had this chair since I was three years old. I distinctly remember bringing with us from Florida, where my grandparents lived, to New York in our dark blue station wagon. It was a gift from my grandparents to me, although why a chair seemed like an appropriate gift for people with 3 or 4 kids on an 800 mile trip, I have no idea. Anyway, I love this chair for its sentimental value. But it was in need of some loving. And so…


Here it is now! I got my inspiration from this painting, sold on Etsy. This was one of my first Pinterest pins, 36 weeks ago according to my board. (It takes me awhile to put ideas to use sometimes.)

First I painted the chair a soft antique white and sanded down a few edges for that distressed look. I found a bird-on-branch silhouette that I liked by googling, traced it on the chair, and painted it with plain acrylic paint.

Pinterest saved the day again with this link to "how to paint letters perfectly." Basically, you print out whatever you want to paint in the font that you wish, position and tape them where you want them, and then trace over the letters very hard with a ballpoint pen. The pen leaves an indentation, which you can see only on a bright, sunny day in front of a window, if you are like me.

If you look really hard, you can see the words on the section above the paper.

A tiny paintbrush and a steady hand are essential for this project. A kitten is not.

I could only do one line at a time because my hand got really cramped. But I'm kind of wimpy like that.

Also, I had to wait for the perfect light, and we've had many rainy days.


And that cat kept wanting to pounce on my paintbrush. But ultimately, I finished it. And I am sooooo very happy with the result!

My last step is to put a couple of coats of polycrylic on the seat, just to make sure the paint doesn't get rubbed off.

I'm getting closer to actually working in the office. Next up, the search for the perfect comfy chair.

Putting Pinterest to Use

My goal: to make Pinterest more than just a place to collect ideas. I want to put those ideas to use. So each week I'm going to list a few of my pins and put them to work in my life.

This Week on Pinterest

Most Promising Homeschooling Finds
• Free Printable Worksheets: brainteasers, mazes, graphs, much more.
• Free Audio Books: absolutely tons of free audio books, for people of all ages. Classics, unusual titles, and more. This one could be amazing!
• Physics Lapbook(s): This Squidoo site has foldables and ideas for six physics lapbooks! It looks amazing. Since Duncan isn't taking any science at co-op this semester, I really need to look into this more. My goal is to begin one of these this week.
• Science Experiments in a Bag: This is such a great idea. My kids used to love when I'd get out the leftovers from the Sonlight science kits. I need to make a bunch up for Duncan.

• Synonym Flower: The link doesn't go into detail on this, but the photo is pretty self-explanatory. This is really, really cute and I just happen to be teaching synonyms in creative writing at co-op right now. This might have to be integrated into my WordSmithery curriculum!

Household
• Job buttons: Kids can pick what they want to do and earn money around the house. This is an etsy site and I think the cost is quite reasonable, but I'll probably end up making these somehow on my own. My kids are always asking how they can earn money, and I always mean to put some kind of system into place. There is also a chore chart on the etsy store that gives lots of ideas for jobs.
• Homemade furniture polish: Why not?
• Magical carpet cleaner: I have tried this already, and it was amazing. I am going to work on a few more spots today.

Crafty
• Magazine rack: This would look amazing in my new office and/or modified to hold cookbooks or whatever. I'm pretty sure Randy and Duncan would love to make a couple of sets of these for me.
• Quilt: I like this simple quilt pattern. As soon as I get my sewing machine set up, I am going to start it.
• Cloth coasters: We really need these. I'm always cleaning drink residue off our coffee and end tables. I repeat: as soon as I get my sewing machine set up....

Food
• Mississippi Mud Pie: Ridiculous. I must try it.
• Italian sausage and basil red sauce: Yum. I repinned this from my daughter, so I keep hoping she is going to make it.
• Twice baked potato casserole: This is going to show up on our menu sometime this week.

****
I also like to see what others are pinning from my blog. Here are this week's 5 most popular pins from SmallWorld at Home:
• Titanic Unit Study
• WordSmithery Creative Writing Lessons
• Homeschooling Articles
• Lapbooking Resources
• Rainbow simile poem


So how do you put Pinterest to work for you?