It will go down as the Great Onesie Pinterest Fail of 2013. I was helping to throw a baby shower and volunteered to lead a onesie craft. The guest of honour is so uber-creative that she sewed all the bridesmaids dresses for her wedding, so this had to be good.
Bingo! After a quick search I found beachy-cool onesies with whimsical designs created by using bleach pens. I bought some snapsuits to test it out before the shower, but the colour didn't budge. I refused to believe Pinterest would steer me wrong, so I decided maybe I needed to dye my own white onesies, and then try the bleach pens again. The dye didn't cover evenly, probably because I have never used RIT in my life, and my daughter was "helping." And you know what? The bleach pen still. didn't. take.
In the end, my friend received a bag full of tie-dyed onesies, perfect for the pint-size stoner. It was the only thing I could do to cover up the uneven dying. Also, I now own all the bleach pens.
To me, Pinterest is like the bad boyfriend you keep going back to. Just when you realise you need to stay away because he always makes you feel terrible about yourself, he reels you back in with a really good chicken recipe. I've gotten a few genius ideas from Pinterest and love it for keeping track of things I see online. But mostly my boards are a boulevard of broken dreams, where I must confront the fact that I will never have enough time, money — or let's face it — get-up-and-go to create a picture-perfect life for my family.
Now I realise I'm not alone. According to a new survey from TODAY Moms, 42 percent of mums experience "Pinterest stress," anxiety that they are not as crafty or creative as people who pin gorgeous images of their kids' birthday parties on the social bookmarking site. Nothing has done more than Pinterest to up the ante on holidays, birthday parties even just plain old playtime ("Create a kiddie car wash in your backyard!" was one recent pin I saw that had me wishing for a cocktail just looking at it).
Fortunately, there's also Pinterest Fail, a spoof site that shows how these "easy" projects can go awry with photo of the original project juxtaposed with its hilarious real mom execution. It reminds me the most important element of any party isn't hand-calligraphied place cards but laughter — and despite the onesie fail, we still had plenty of that.
