Life in Geezerville: Pinterest Edition

Meet BunBun, Mattie and KitKat. I was going to start this edition with "once upon a time" but no matter how hard I tried, I could not come up with a "good enough" story for my 3 little critters. All I could think about was how they came to be. They are all figments of my imagination...with the help of  some well placed pictures on Pinterest.

Pinterest is an app and a website that is filled with thousands of pages of pictures on just about any topic you can imagine. If you need inspiration for a project, click on Pinterest, search for your topic, and pictures will appear. More pictures than you can imagine on your topic. Needless to say, there are a gazillion pages on crochet; but if you are looking for anything from aardvarks, to cleaning your stove, to zebras, there will be a lot of pictures on your topic. I get a lot of ideas from Pinterest pages. It's my go-to place when I'm looking for ideas.

Sometimes the ideas are fantastic...sometimes not so much. When I search for crochet patterns for cats, I'll find hundreds of hits, but there is a catch. People from all over the world post on Pinterest, so there are patterns written in Russian or Chinese or Greek. Sometimes, there is not a pattern, only a picture. Sometimes, the picture is free, the pattern is not. BUT, I have a trick up my sleeve. I learned to visualize patterns and I can create my own. I look at the pictures and I say to myself...I think I see the pattern. 

Sometimes I copy the picture and I "stretch" it so I can see each stitch...then I count the stitches and start creating a pattern. Other times, I look at the picture and I take yarn to hook and make what I see. It's great fun for me, but if you should ask if I can show you a printed pattern, I cannot do that. These are patterns in my head just for me. 

That takes us to BunBun, Mattie and KitKat. I saw them on Pinterest and they popped out of my yarn and hook. I've made a lot of kitties over the last couple of years, and I've discovered Kitty is a "basic pattern" that can be modified into other "kitty-shaped" critters...and that's how BunBun came into existence. You can see they are somewhat similar.

But, there are 2 differences--the ears, the tail and the body shape--but I think you can see they are "related" (crochet-wise, that is). Mattie on the other hand is another "ball of wax." I saw pictures of little dolls and I just started to fiddle around, and after trial and error, I now have a mental pattern for a dolly.

Slowly, I'm  starting another hobby. The other day I took a class on doodling. Needless to say I went to Pinterest for inspiration and once again, Pinterest gave me lots of ideas. What fun...I still get to create the pattern, but now my imagination is sparked by what other folks have done. What a treat. The "wheel" has already been invented--all I need to do is make modification of the wheel--there's no need to reinvent the wheel. 

I always end each edition of my Geezerville blogs with a bit of whimsy or wisdom...and once again, I don't know which way I'm going to end this one. So, here goes...If you want to start a project and don't know where to begin, try Pinterest. You might find an answer--and if you don't you'll find a bunch of fun pictures, both on- and off-topic, that you can peruse and maybe, one of them will spark your interest and send you on your way to a new experience. Remember, we're all in this together.