My Very Own Pinterest Fails

This year I had the idea that I was going to make Christmas ornaments and give them out as presents. Ha. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Not so much.

I now realize that this is something that should only be attempted by those 10 and under or by people who actually regularly do crafts. I found a couple of what seemed like pretty straightforward and inexpensive (plus environmentally friendly) projects on Pinterest. There was a project for cinnamon dough ornaments: https://www.homemade-gifts-made-easy.com/cinnamon-dough-ornaments.html and this project for papercraft ornaments: https://www.homemade-gifts-made-easy.com/paper-christmas-decorations.html. Both seemed within my rather narrow range of crafting expertise.

At least I found a use for my "Dokdo: A Beautiful Island of Korea" calendar from Dongguk University as seen on the tree-shaped ornament. Also - in this picture Dokdo reminds me of AhCh-To from "The Last Jedi". 

Reader: I tried them, and though they were neither as catastrophic nor as hilarious as a true Pinterest fail should be* I did feel both humbled and disappointed. I felt humbled by the papercraft. I thought that after years of collaging and working with paper, and being, you know, a human adult, that I'd be able to cut out 8 identical circles or Christmas tree shapes or whatever. This did not prove to be the case. I kept tracing the circle not quite perfectly or cutting out the traced shapes just a bit off-kilter. Then when it came to gluing the circles together, the small errors compounded. The end result was not displeasing, per se (several are hung on our own Christmas tree, after all), but they were not deemed good enough to send on to others.

Each of these was somewhat warped and looked pretty much like the unevenly cooked blobs of cinnamon that they, in fact, were. I'm not sure, however, what we could have done differently.

The cinnamon dough ornaments were a bigger blow, although not exactly to my own ego. In this case I was more just disappointed, since I had invested money in buying particular cookie cutters for the project and a huge jar of cinnamon to make the dough. In the end, though I followed the instructions meticulously and Lee and I were both very careful to cut out the shapes perfectly, we ended up with a tray full of slightly warped, imperfect and rather fragile-seeming ornaments, again, not good enough to be given out as gifts.

Sigh. So, on the one hand, I guess I'm glad that I tried something different. I did have some amount of fun doing the papercraft and the cinnamon ornaments at least smelled good baking. On the other hand I'm bummed that I'm empty-handed in terms of Christmas gifts and out a lot of cinnamon. For the relatives I can actually see in person, it looks like I'll be making cookies this year!

In the end this one Wisconsin-shaped ornament did come out sort of decently. Now I have a cinnamon Wisconsin for my tree. It's something, anyway! 

*My husband had never heard of a Pinterest fail before, so I will give you a few websites to peruse if you're also in the dark:

http://pinterestfail.com/
https://www.boredpanda.com/funny-pinterest-fails/

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