I spoke with an adult woman today who had never heard of Pinterest. I know they exist, but I hadn't encountered one in the wild in years. I thought we were all thoroughly corrupted by that most exquisite of time wasters and expectation raisers. Yet there I was, spelling p-i-n-t-e-r-e-s-t to her, telling her it wasn't a place to buy things, per se, but a digital scrapbook for ideas. I think she got it, but I turned her over to capable hands. I have met her teenage daughter a couple of times, and my friend assured me she intended to talk to her about it. I predict a "Mom, of course I know what it is" is coming. "Look at the board I have for recipes I want to try..."
I want to cry that Pinterest lied to me today. It didn't. I tried to substitute something that wasn't chemically equivalent, and the failure was my own fault. I learned last month that the Shrinky Dinks of my childhood are a thing again. Now, I didn't get very creative with them back in the 1970s. I was rather unsophisticated with my crafts back then, as prolific as I might have been for a kid. So when I saw the videos on Pinterest today of all the wild shapes and goofy things people make with shrink plastic now, I realized how pitiful my game was back then.
There were plenty of pins that claimed you can reuse food plastics to make these sorts of crafts. They showed pictures of salad clamshells and soda bottles, saying you can use these, but then in the text somewhere it says to use a number 6 plastic. I had a lid from some Udi's gluten free muffins and an egg carton from Costco to choose from, both number 1 plastic. Surely I could use these, I thought. I wasn't about to put a whole lot of time or effort into the test run. I just grabbed a couple of Sharpies and sketched out the first thing that came to mind (a Harry Potter lightning bolt and Deathly Hallows symbol). I cut them out, and dug out some all steel pins to poke holes in them, just in case. I warmed up the oven, and dug out a scrap of parchment paper I'd cut away from something and shoved in my kitchen drawer. Maybe I shouldn't have peeked so often. Maybe I should have had the oven hotter. Or maybe I shouldn't have imagined the number on the plastic container wasn't important. They shrank only the tiniest bit, and curled significantly. They might be salvageable with the iron, but I had just put it and the ironing board away from the craft room after it sat out and took up space since the Rotary Christmas party. I wasn't about to bother pulling it right back out. This was just a throwaway experiment.
I could totally hear my old friend's voice in my head, when I looked at the mangled, un-shrunk plastic bits, that looked nothing like the pretty things I saw on Pinterest. "Nailed it!"
No comments:
Post a Comment