Practically Pinterest Perfect: First Fiasco...

The original pin.

I wanted to start out with something simple, so of course I chose to make adorable paintings. My first step was to find a pin off of Pinterest that I liked, and then buy the materials. They added up to a total of 12 dollars, which I thought was a fairly reasonable price.

I came back to my apartment very anxious and excited, I was ready to get going and do some work making a seriously cute craft! I just forgot one major thing...the leaves. Without the leaves I was just going to have pink and blue painted boards, how cute would have that been? Not so cute. So I set out on an adventure with my roommate to find the perfect leaves. This was a fairly simple task, we live in a beautiful place that has tons of trees so I just chose the best looking leaves and took them. I hope that wasn't a bad thing to do...whoops! (For all you tree lovers out there, I'm very sorry I robbed a few trees of their leaves).

While the leaves were being squished in a book, I started painting the white canvas squares with the blue and pink paint that I got at the store. That was a very easy job, the paint went on smoothly and dried remarkably quickly. I was quite impressed, so far things were seeming to be going great! Unfortunately things were about to go South...way South. Like almost to Mexico south.

When my boards were sufficiently dry I got the leaves out of the books and put them on the boards. Now this is where big mistake number one comes in: I didn't allow the leaves to "squish" long enough, so they did not lay flat on the board. I decided in my naive mind that this wasn't going to be a big problem at all. Boy was I wrong! Big mistake number two: I didn't secure the leaf on the canvas before I started spray painting. DO NOT DO THAT! It did not turn out at all because the moment I started spraying the canvas with the spray paint, the leaf moved around and made it impossible to get a good outline of it. It ended up looking like a blob, a big fat ugly blob. It was awful! So when I went to do the second one, I got a little bit smarter.

I decided to tape the leaf down so that when I sprayed it, it would stay! I'd call that stroke of genius divine intervention because the next one turned out great! After taping it all down, which took about 10 minutes to really get it down good, I sprayed it and SHABAM! It looks great! Overall, this craft was simple and turned out pretty amazing.

My advice for someone else who is thinking about doing this is: Yes! Go for it, but be patient. I was too anxious to get started so I didn't let the leaves flatten enough and it made it much more difficult to tape it down. So be patient and in the end you'll have a totally adorable craft that was worth the 3 hours or so that I put into it! Rate for this pin on a scale of 1 to 10 (1 being a dirty diaper and 10 being the Mona Lisa): 6.5- somewhere between Zac Efron and corn on the cob.