For some reason, I have never managed to get all that excited about Facebook; I’m on it, but never check my page (is that what it’s called?). I signed up for Twitter when it first started, but immediately got overwhelmed by the whole concept and have never been back. But Pinterest, oh, what a wonderful (albeit time consuming) addiction that visual feast is! I got an invitation when they just started, but didn’t have time to play with it until recently, and now it’s one of my favorite ways to spend a few spare minutes! A little treat after finishing an especially challenging project or boring house chore. Or while drinking my morning cup of tea. Or a glass of wine in the evening. Or while unwinding from a long day in the office, or…
I love that you can find pretty much everything there, and how easy it is to add images from just about everywhere. And it is the perfect place to create vision boards (or mood boards, dream boards, inspiration boards, whatever you want to call them).
Last year, I went to a fabulous book release event for Holly Becker (of the awesome blog Decor8) at Anthropologie (it was for her first book, Decorate, which I absolutely love
). Holly gave a wonderful and inspiring talk about creating mood boards and how to pull inspiration from all kinds of things you come across (pieces of string, fabric, candy wrappers, anything), magazines you read, etc. All great advice, except she suggest tearing out pages with things you like from magazines – well, I simply can’t bring myself to do that.
I don’t know why, but it is impossible for me to tear anything out of or throw a magazine away (at least if it’s in decent shape, I did sadly have to get rid of several boxes of old ones recently that had been sitting in the basement for quite some time and collected disgusting, and probably hazardous, amounts of mold). Instead, I have lists of where I have seen things, scans of images, dog-eared pages, small post-its sticking out of everything, handwritten notes, spreadsheets with links to inspiration, etc. As you can imagine, after a while, things get a bit out of hand and you can’t find anything.
Enter Pinterest. I can’t imagine why I didn’t come up with the idea for that site! It is the perfect solution for people like me. I come across so much information and inspiration every single day online, and now, instead of copying it all and pasting into a word doc or bookmarking the URL (have I ever looked at that bookmark list? No!) it is so easy to just save it on a board, with a little note to yourself. Before you know it, you have a colorful collection of favorites and can clearly see where you’re going with a re-decorating idea, or dream home location, start working towards a specific, tangible goal, and hopefully get that law of attraction working for you (which is the whole idea behind a vision board).
I’m currently working on a few that I have been adding to in my head over many years now: a Dream Home vision board (below), a Swedish Summer Cottage vision board, and a Cottage Home vision board (as well as a bunch of other random likes and wishes – cute animals, wall art, DIY projects, recipes, etc.)
How about you, are you finding it as irresistable as I do? And for those of you who haven’t tried it, you have to check it out! Sign up for a Pinterest invite and start pinning!