Oh, That's... Pinteresting...

Someone once told me that if you think of yourself as deserving a good world and life, you keep your house clean and nice.  That's obviously a big statement and it comes with a lot of baggage, but if you think about it, it has some semblance of something to it.  A clean and well-maintained space does, at least for me, provide a more stable playground for creativity and life in general.

Lately I got to thinking about my online "spaces".  Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and Pinterest are kind of like separate spaces for our online selves (you were onto something, MySpace!), and the truth is we spend a lot of time in those spaces.  They all serve different purposes, too. Facebook is a space for my "real life".  This blog is the space where some of my ideas are presented.  Pinterest is the space where I collect inspiration for those ideas.  It's also where I collect ideas for my house, for my design work, for my writing, for food, for entertaining, for my wedding... Pinterest is like my catch-all creative studio of madness.

I joined Pinterest when it first came out and on a bit of a whim.  My original thought was kind of that I had enough online "spaces" to manage and I didn't need another.  But then, like many people, I got sucked in!  There are so many great ideas out there, I couldn't help but get involved in the Pinterest world.  Plus, it's an awesome way to collect visual ideas for something like a wedding or shower.

But since I joined kind of haphazardly and then got sucked in all of a sudden, I basically went in with no plan whatsoever. As a result created a lot of random pinboards that have no real sense behind them. Pins upon pins were lost under headings like "Cool!" which could seriously apply to anything at all.  Then I'd go back to find a pin and have no idea where I put it - under cool, or under awesome?

I decided to organize my pinboards.  If you're like me and joined Pinterest on a whim and then found yourself obsessed, I can't recommend doing this enough.

Here's what my Pinterest looked like before my re-vamp:

I mean, Love, Cute Ideas, Art Projects to Try, and Interesting were all kind of the same thing!

So I got to work creating much more descriptive, organized pins.  Here's how the boards are organized now:

These are organized by what the pins are either functioning as or providing inspiration for.  Gift ideas, design inspiration, home inspiration, wedding inspiration, etc.

I'll admit that Weird/Funny/Awesome is still a little vague, but come on!  How else could I have possibly categorized this:

❤ Lauren