Moving Week: Day 2 Pinterest Ideas

Welcome to Moving day two! To see day one which talked about supplies for moving go here.

Today we're talking about some of the tips I used from Pinterest and the ones I wished I had.

I had seen a couple tricks for packing up dishes on Pinterest and I decided to combine them.

Here is the first pin that I tried. I have two sets of dishes to I used two buckets. This only partially worked. One of my buckets was a 5-gallon bucket and the other was a 3-gallon bucket. The problem was that both buckets tapered and I'm not sure if all buckets taper but both of the ones I had did. . I put a sturdy plastic bag (like one you get from a clothing store not the grocery store) inside and then placed the bags in but they still wedged in 6 inches above the bottom of the bucket. Knowing that though you could put something in the bottom. This makes the bucket very heavy so much make sure you mark that the bucket is heavy.

I also used this trick to pack my dishes inside the buckets.

This worked well and we didn't have any casualties.

Here is one tip I wished I had used:




and here is one great blog post about moving.

Have you found any great pins about moving?

Join us tomorrow for general packing and moving tips! 

Wayward Pin Fail

Ever seen something on Pinterest you think you can do? Yeah, yesterday we decided we would make something we found. We (I'm at Jordan's house and decided to make fun things with her kids) decided to make unicorn cookies/ rainbow swirl cookies.

Well...they did not turn out as expected. I had Jordan's 3 older kids help make the dough, stir in the food coloring and roll out "snakes" of each color. I only figured out how to really swirl the colors after I had done most of the batch. And the colors didn't turn out well. Also, MORE FLOUR! It might be that whole higher elevation thing but wow...these were flat flat flat. At least they tasted good!

These were definitely WAYWARD!

Pintesting: alcohol for a microfiber couch

Right before we found out I was pregnant with my first baby, we bought a house. To furnish said house, we bought a microfiber couch and loveseat.

In off-white.

Yeeeeah.

Allegedly the couches were treated with some sort of protectant that meant you could only use water on the seats. But using water to clean your cushions leads to watermarks, which look even worse than the stains themselves:

The spot-cleaning with water solution is pretty much worse than the problem here.

Naturally, even though I'm not much of a deep cleaner, I had to repin this cleaning idea.

Source: chrisandrobinsnest.blogspot.com viaJordan on Pinterest

The basic idea: use rubbing alcohol instead of water.

Alcohol dries faster than water (the technical term for this chemical property is "volatility." Now you know), so the alcohol won't leave those big watermarks. Once it's dry, you take a scrub brush to the fabric to lift the fibers again.

Results!

A lot better, but obviously not perfect. I might have been able to get better results with more alcohol and more scrubbing, but it's very hard to tell how much scrubbing you still need to do when the entire cushion is wet! And if you're getting the entire cushion wet . . . hm.

Verdict:

My other solution to this problem was to liberally wet the entire couch top of the cushion: no edges, no watermarks, right?

Frankly, my solution was a bit easier. Both methods require considerable elbow grease, but my hands got tired from working the sprayer (a very wet rag is sufficient to clean the couches with water). Plus alcohol fumes are NOT fun. Alcohol does dry a lot faster (the above pictures were taken about an hour after the before shots, and the couch was dry enough that we put the cushions back on).

Also, neither method is effective on stains like pen, candy or permanent marker, and neither really helped with the very dirty arms of the couch.

And of course, a year later, the couch is just as bad—worse in places where my youngest has decided to express her artistic side. :\

Pintesting success:

I don't want to be all bad news. I tried this pin this weekend, and as you'd probably expect, the results were perfect:

Source: Laura on Pinterest

Line a bowl with foil before draining meat for easy cleanup! My husband thought this was so clever, he had to tell me twice!

Planning With Pinterest

Ok so planning a wedding using Pinterest is a love/hate relationship. I started the whole wedding planning by mid-August and I started on Pinterest.com. I quickly decided this was no easy task. Here are some tips I picked up from my searching. This can also be applied to just about any even planning.

Look for boards of real brides not dream weddings:
Dream weddings are great but they aren't realistic. You probably aren't going to have a 17 tiered cake with your venue made of pure gold. You can search just boards and not pins.
I searched for "Winter Weddings" and actually got a lot of results. By searching with the type of event it really does help because there will hopefully be boards named something similar and boards could be tagged with keywords that can lead your search to where you want it.

Pin one thing at a time:
If you click on the "Weddings" category, you're going to get a lot of random stuff that's repetitive and sometimes a little risque. It's fun just to look through somethings but really I found it overwhelming and not applicable to what I want for my wedding.

I decided to attack one thing at a time. I found a dress that I liked and searched the designer on Pinterest. I found lots of pins relating to the designer. I also checked out some of the boards from when people repinned what I liked to see if they had other good ideas. I did the same thing for centerpieces and bridesmaid dresses, too. Started with an idea, searched it on pinterest and saw where that lead me.

Look at more pins from uploader:
Did you know that when you click on a pin you can see where they were uploaded from? This will take you to the website which opens you up to many ideas straight from the source. Also, when you click on the uploader link, this will show you what other pins come from that website. (You can do this with our website on Pinterest too!!)

Also, did you know if you have another window open to Google.com, you can click and drag the pin over to Google and Google will search for where the picture has been (my wonderful sister, Brooke, told me about this!) This can help if the pin does not include where it was originally pinned from instead of annoying websites that really don't help in planning like Tumblr.

A month of Pinterest menu planning Monday

This year I've been working on my menu planning. I've done pretty well, usually using a couple of my favorite cookbooks. But this month, I decided to use a different recipe source: Pinterest!

Let's be honest: most of the recipes I pin only get that far. It was time to change that. I turned to my Savory Recipe board . . . which didn't have quite as many recipes as I thought. But I did have a couple collections of recipes pinned, so I managed to find enough to fill up my calendar.

In the last week, we've enjoyed:

Chicken curry (scroll down on the page)
To make this fresh, I added coconut milk and chicken broth to make the sauce (about 10 oz a piece). I omitted the mango because . . . weird, and the mangoes at my grocery store weren't looking so happy, and skipped the zucchini because my husband doesn't like zucchini, and again, weird.

I also adapted this for the pressure cooker using these basic instructions.

It was my first time using my pressure cooker. I don't know why it is that when I try to take a picture of soup, all I can see is steam, but when I try to take a picture of steam, I get nothing. Sigh.

And I froze half of raw the meal to use for a slow cooker meal later.

[Sorry, no picture]

Spinach salad with cranberries, candied almonds, red onions and chicken (a leftover from another meal)

Black bean & corn salsa + chicken quesadillas (tortillas, cheese & chopped chicken [again, leftover])

We round out our weeks with homemade pizza on Fridays (crust recipe from Fast Easy Bread), breakfast for dinner on Saturdays and leftovers!

Upcoming meals:

• Martha Stewart's Baked Penne with Chicken & Sundried Tomatoes (recipe makes 2 dinners, so you get a freezer meal, too) via Six Sisters' Stuff
• Goulash (note to sisters: okay, but maybe if I make it, it won't be like hers)
• Baked ziti (Mom's specialty, but you can also find a recipe here)
• Maple apple chicken
• Naan with feta and tomato chicken salad
• Curried cranberry chicken + couscous

This menu plan is tasty and will give us at least 3 "free" meals for the freezer! Better still, I have dinner planned from Sept 10 through October 6, with lots of ideas for the next four weeks (prime soup season!).

Do you make what you pin on Pinterest? Are you ready for a challenge?

Using Pinterest

Pinterest is a website where we can certainly get carried away very easily. When I joined I had to wait quite a while for them to get back to me and accept my request to join the site. I'm not sure if that's how it is now but maybe it is. So using Pinterest. Here's some overall tips:

• Don't repin stuff you will never make, never read, or never look at again; it's just silly.
• Do click on the pin to see where the original comes from and to see if it's something attainable or something you really can do.
• Don't spend too much time on it (it's super easy to spend a lot of time on there but don't get carried away and waste time!)
• Do have fun with it! Find fun stuff that you can actually make or create or whatever! 

Pinterest starts you out with some generic boards that are easy and good to have. You can also add your own touch to your account.
Ok here's how to create a board:
Click on the "Add +" button.

Then select "Create a Board"

Here you can name and categorize what your board will be. You can also add other pinners to the board. My sisters, mother and I all share a board which is really just full of our jokes and humor. Then just like that, you are ready to start pinning to that board!

Have any other tips for pinners?

Shoe Hangers

As I said last week, we just moved. and with moving comes purging and re-arranging. Our new place has a big master bedroom closet but that's about all it has in the way of storage. So a lot of things have to fit in there, including my craft stash, all my clothes and shoes. I found this cool idea on Pinterest (do you want an invite? Email me!):

Link here

 PERFECT idea for me! So I got to it:

and then I realized I didn't really have the tools I needed, so I improvised. My method is not the best, but it sure is WAYWARD!

Materials:

Wire Hanger

Tools:

Wire Cutter and Pliers would be best, but I used what I had, a pair of garden shears and a small adjustable wrench

Eye protection would have been a safe idea (I didn't have any problems, but you never know)

Step one, cut the wire hanger like so: 

On both sides, see?

 Then take your wrench pliers, and bend up the sides you just cut. Mine weren't the best because I was using that wrench.

Repeat on the opposite side

Then use your hand and pliers to bend the hanger like so. 

Here it is in action:

Oh, my beloved Bernardo's.

So my attempts weren't as cute as the original, but they are very functional and fast! I made 5 in about 10 minutes. I love that you can use them for flats too. 

Have you ever thought of hanging up your shoes?