Your Pin Broke

From Lori:

Well.  Ages ago, I pinned this pin: http://pinterest.com/pin/103231016428119882/ .  According to Martha Stewart, you just make lines of caulk six inches apart on the bottom of an area rug, and it becomes slip proof.

I hadn’t looked at the pin in a long time, but I remembered it while shopping in Home  Depot.  I spoke to an associate, mentioned I had never worked with caulk before, and explained the project.  A few minutes later, I was on my way with a tube of caulk.

I decided to embark on the project at 10:00 at night.  It was really hard to cut the nozzle on the caulk.  The bottom kept popping off.  Eventually I got the caulk to squeeze out of the nozzle…but it just blobbed sadly, rather than falling into the neat, straight lines on the pin.  Again, the back exploded off, oozing caulk all over me and the rug.

I found out only after I had given up, turned the rug over and thrown away my sad little tube of caulk that there’s something called a caulk gun, that is necessary if one wishes to caulk successfully.  Who knew?

*To make this even better, when I finally did go back and look at the original pin, there’s a caulk gun in the picture.  Always go back and look at the directions!

I’ve done the same thing, saw an awesome idea on Pinterest and then, without consulting the source, headed off to gather my supplies and attempt the project without realizing all I needed to do or buy.  It’s okay, Lori, we’ve all done it.  We might not have made this big of a mess, though…

From Jeanne -

I was attempting this yummy sounding cream cheese pound cake 

and wrote down the directions wrong. It says to bake the cake for 1 hour and 40 minutes. I wrote down 1 hour. However, even 1 hour is too long for a cake recipie, even a big one made in a bundt pan. You might end up with this: 

which as you might note, is blacker than my very messy counter-top. On the upside however, if you ignore the blackened crust, the inside actually tastes pretty good!  

Aww Jeanne, what a bummer!  It’s hard to admit user error, so kudos to you for ‘fessing up!  The inside DOES look yummy still!

So my kids are obsessed with the movie My Neighbor Totoro. My teen daughter decided to have a Totoro themed party during Spring Break, so of course we’d have Totoro inspired snacks. Like the Oh So Easy Totoro Cream Puffs I found.

The creator said they were so easy, she made them on a weeknight for coworkers.

I mean how hard could it be?

Well, the recipe itself involved 15 minutes of stirring over a hot stove. Then, I dumped the pastry part on my 13 year old and left the house.

When I got home, it was time to make Totoro out of the dough. This is the part where it all went terribly wrong.

These did not look like Totoro. They looked more like Schnitzel from the cartoon Chowder. Radda Radda

At least they tasted good.

I blogged about the whole miserable experience including losing water part way through.

From Krista:

I promise I wasn’t trying to fail when I made this.

I know it sounds suspicious, me being the creator of YourPinBroke.com and all, but really, I thought I could do it! It is called “easy artisan bread,” after all! I thought maybe I could pull it off, but instead I ended up with 2 artisan biscuits.

I think what we have here is a case of Pinterest causing someone who is sub-par (at best) in the kitchen to think she is a master chef.

Though I will say that the bread tasted pretty good! Even better if you close your eyes!

From Krista:

I’m having pretty bad luck with Pinterest projects this week.  First the wrapping paper thing and now this.  But I guess that’s what happens when you start attempting lots of things you see on Pinterest.  I’m trying to do some neat activities with my kids (for more on that, see this post on my other blog, The Playdate Crashers) and we’re using some ideas that we found there — I guess they can’t all be winners.

I needed some finger paint for a craft we did today with my kids.  Since they’re 3 and 2, something that won’t kill them if they eat or injest it is preferred.  I saw a lot of recipes out there but decided to try this one…PLEASE NOTE:  This particular recipe is NOT edible, it contains dishwashing liquid.

What I ended up with was NOT a delightful gel mixture that my children could happily paint with, we had a nasty, watery mess that stained our hands.

It separated into a nasty watery mess and a slimy mess on the bottom.  They are separate but equally messy. 

We were able to at least stain our white paper into grayish/purplish colors for our elephants we were making.  (I made 3 colors, red, green, and black.)  They were unusable, so I had to dump it all out.

The only bright side was that it made a nice sink full of bubbles when I washed out all the dishes and containers used.  *sigh*

I honestly have no idea what went wrong.  I suppose I just didn’t keep it on the heat long enough, but I stirred that sucker on low heat for a long time and it never turned into anything like paint.

From Sarah:

This one seems simple enough. PB, banana, wrap, roll, cut. Right?

Right.  Next time, I’ll use an entire jar of PB, and freeze before cutting.

From Krista (the Your Pin Broke creator!):

I didn’t think there was any way this Pin could go wrong.  It couldn’t be simpler.  Take a toilet paper (or paper towel) tube, cut it, and use it to hold wrapping paper together so it doesn’t become a disorganized mess.

Unfortunately when I cut the tube, it made it so loose that it doesn’t hold anything together!  It just slides right off the wrapping paper.  Not very helpful. 

I suppose it all depends on the brand of toilet paper/paper towel and the size of your wrapping paper.  The blog linked in the Pin doesn’t give any instructions or specifics.  Possibly I use cheap toilet paper that doesn’t have super strength cardboard tubes? 

If the sizing is right, it might work, OR you might be able to just put the toilet paper tube on the wrapping paper without cutting it.  But for me, this was a fail.