Fall Leaf Ornaments and a Thanksgiving Tree. Blame Pinterest.

Linking up with Mama Kat's Workshop again this week. The prompt I chose is:

1. "Create something inspired by Pinterest - was it a win or a fail?"

I'm a sucker for cute crafts that look easy and for suckers like me, Pinterest is like the conman on the corner with an overcoat full of shiny watches just waiting for a chump to meander by.

I meander daily. And I pin all sorts of crafts and recipes that I'd like to try. Most of them I never get to, but last year my daughter, sister, and I decided to decorate some pumpkins for Halloween using some ideas we found on Pinterest.

I decided to try to make a version of these:

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It looked easy enough. For the sequined one, you paint the pumpkin white, spread glue all over the top of it and sprinkle on the sequins. For the glitter ones, you buy "glue dots" and stick those on, then sprinkle glitter on them.

I couldn't find "glue dots". I bought the little glue circles that you use to stick pictures in a scrapbook because that was the closest thing I could find. They were small, but I figured it was okay because I was using small craft pumpkins, not the regular size ones shown in the picture.

The problem was, when you peel the perfect circle dot of glue off the paper, it is no longer a circle. It is a blob. I wound up with blobs of glitter all over the pumpkins.

And as for the sequins, well...they just didn't look the same. Maybe the sequins I used were too big. I don't know. But it didn't look like the picture. at. all.

Then I thought I could rescue the whole failed attempt by painting letters on the pumpkins. I thought I would spell out "Give Thanks" and put them on my mantle.

I tried to freestyle the letters. It looked like a 5 year old wrote them. Truly. It was a mess. See for yourself:

As you can see, I didn't bother making the "Thanks."

But...this story has a happy ending.

My daughter and I pulled out the remainder of the pumpkins this year and decided to just throw some glitter all over the little bastards and see how that turned out:

Glitter makes everything better! I'm going to do the rest of them in a variety of colors and call it a day.

The sneaky conman that is Pinterest struck again this year. I saw a couple Thanksgiving trees and decided I had to make one.

But before I could do that, I had to make some Fall-ish ornaments. So I saw these and decided to make my own version of them, with my daughter's help:

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If you look close, they decoupaged the leaf to the outside of a clear ornament. 

Yeah. Too complicated. 

I decided to roll up the leaves lengthwise and slip them inside the ornament. Once inside, they unroll and stick to the sides. We used a pencil to sort of arrange them in there how we wanted them. We put 3 - 4 leaves in each one. 

Pinterest Success!

For the tree, I bought some dollar star leaf garland, some leaf stems, ribbon at Wal-mart, and pulled out some sparkly pinecone Christmas ornaments that I already had.

Here's the result:

Thanksgiving Tree!

For the topper, we looped the ribbon a bunch of times and tied it with a twist tie to hold it, then stuck a bunch of leaf stems together and twist tied the whole thing to the top:

Not bad for a Pinterest chump

My faith in Pinterest restored, I'm now on the hunt for cute Christmas ornaments to make. I'm such a sucker.

How about you? Any Pinterest fails or successes to confess?