Do not go on Pinterest if you want to continue feeling good about yourself. Do go on Pinterest if you want see how talented, creative, and apparently wealthy everyone else is.
Of course I’m just kidding. Pinterest is a wonderful resource, and if you treat it for what it is (namely, an internet website), you can walk away without hating yourself. It’s true that there are now new forms of depression and obsession that have developed solely because of social media, and that makes sense. They call them “Pinterest fails” for a reason. And have you ever seen any of those? Hilarious! But honestly, if we embraced the components of our own lives we might be able to give some of those creative, witty, and resourceful Pinterest ideas a try!
If you simply type in “cardboard boxes” you will immediately see pin after pin of awesome looking DIY cardboard toys. Okay, let’s stop there. I said “give some of these try”. Not “replicate them to perfection”. The fact is that we aren’t starting out with the same resources of whomever that even created what they have posted (starting at our brains), so we can automatically start to assume that our project will NOT come up looking the same. And that’s okay.
Do you have some cardboard boxes? If you do, awesome. You are one step closer to attempting a cool Pinterest idea. So, you type in “cardboard boxes”. You can make a pirate ship or a mailbox. If you have a ton of them you can tape them all together and make a maze. You can make a marble labyrinth game, which actually gave me an idea… I took some old cardboard boxes that were in the burn pile and cut them down so that they were trays. I squirted different colors of paint on the bottom. Tossed in a couple of black walnut pods and taught the children how to hold and tip the tray so that the black walnuts would roll through the paint and create a very Jackson Pollock-esque painting.
Don’t have kids? Dress up the boxes with cloth and rope and turn it all into a beautiful storage box, or any number of organizational containers. Don’t even want to make anything, you were trying to find those subscription boxes and you couldn’t remember what they were called for the life of you? Those pop up, too (and they are my favorite). I want to try all of those subscription boxes… but I don’t want to spend thousands of dollars, and that would just happen.