My friend Marek, who is pretty and smart, gave a call out to us Pinterest addicts users. She noticed that she’s pinned hundreds of projects in the year that she’s had a Pinterest account and had whipped up very little of those projects. She wondered if anyone else was in the same boat and as an incentive to mobilize our creativity, offered a guest blog opportunity. Look for this post (or a variation of it) to be published to her site soon!

My Stats: 9 boards, 290 pins, and 8 projects tackled (in no particular order):

• Project 1: Almond Milk
• Project 2: Waffle Irons + Canned Baked Goods
• Project 3: Body Soap
• Project 4: Bought this book
• Project 5: Asked the Universe for this
• Project 6: Made oatmeal
• Project 7: Made raw carrot soup
• Project 8: Tried a new crochet technique

1. Almond milk making is a resounding success. I haven’t bought any Almond Breeze since I brought home my Vitamix. Even in a decent blender I think anyone could make this delicious plant milk. PS – Almond milk has zero hormones, has twice the calcium as cow’s milk and is lower in calories. Just sayin’. The cost of making my own milk isn’t much less than buying it, but I am making no contribution to the landfill when I make my own milk. The leftover pulp gets turned into muffins, too!

2. We “waffled” biscuits and cinnamon rolls one weekend. My kids thought it was super-neat and it couldn’t be more convenient to have a hot, delicious waffle than popping a can and baking it in a waffle maker. The down side is that they don’t taste like regular waffles and the cinnamon roll ones were a little chewy. I got around this by flattening them in the center of my 4-square waffle iron so the circle could be broken into quadrants and eaten like finger food.

3. Body soap was WAY easy to make. As far as use goes… I still think this is a keeper. Granted, I do have to use more soap than normal as the suds leave the puffy before I’m done spreading all the bubbles. BUT, for the price of one bottle of generic body wash, I’m able to make 4-6 months worth of soap. And I can keep refilling the same body wash container so I’m being environmentally friendly (which was the tipping point that motivated me to do this).

4. I finally just bought War of Art instead of waiting for it from the library. You should, too.

5. I pinned this Kitchen Aid Mixer. It is totally my Official Red Ryder Carbine-Action Two-Hundred-Shot Range Model Air Rifle. I didn’t expect to really get one but low and behold, my best friend got it for me for Christmas/birthday. I squealed as she walked in with the bright red package because only ONE thing comes in a box that size. Then I Snoopy Danced as I tore the paper from the box. Pinning karma FTW!

6. Go check out that oatmeal and the accompanying site. I wasn’t terribly impressed by that particular oatmeal recipe, but was very impressed with the blog. She’s got loads of interesting, healthy recipes and gave me a Life Hack that had never occurred to me: putting my crockpot on a manual timer. I bought a super cheap one in the Christmas Clearance area of Target a couple of weeks ago and it works like a charm! Now I can have my crockpot click on halfway through the day for recipes that would die with 9 hours of simmering. Or have oatmeal turn on in the middle of the night so that I wake up to breakfast. Boo-yah.

7. Seriously, that soup was delicious. It took a shit-ton of carrots to produce all of the necessary carrot juice, but it was a delicious cold soup.

8. Yeah…. notice how I said “Try a crochet technique”? I first typed finished a new crochet pattern but retracted that bold statement. There’s about 6 inches of scarf sitting on a bookshelf in my living room. It is a sloooow stitch, in my opinion. And I made a mistake that I’ll have to pull out if I want an attractive scarf. I bet I do nothing with it, or pull all of it out and stitch something faster and more gratifying. Or learn to knit, which is what actually needs to happen. 🙂