Recent failures

After my Minoru post where many lovely people said how clever they thought I was (thank you - you're good for my ego ;-), I thought I'd post some recent failures, just to show you that while I have some successes with my creativeness, there sure are plenty of less than perfect things happening here on a regular basis.

Take these biscuits for example. Or don't. They were awful. I'd had some ripe bananas laying around and thought "I'll just chop them up and throw them into this tried and trusted recipe, and add some flour to stabilise it. They'll be beautiful for the kids' afternoon tea and a snack for me and my friend". Hmm, they turned out bland, dry and tasteless. The kids ate them of course - anything sweet and cake-like they'll eat, but they were so awful that I refused to let my friend try them...

And this sewing effort. I'd had a cute tutorial pinned for ages and finally got around to trying it. When I started I confidently thought "I'll make lots of these for the school fete, some for friends, for the kids. It'll be my go-to handmade gift of choice". Until I realised the need to sew a perfect circle was crucial to the outcome and ended up not enjoying the process at all - and it looked terrible at the end, all wonky and uneven with awful seams showing. Oh well. Scrap that idea!

Can't win 'em all I guess! Got to take the good with the bad... And all those other cliches ;-)

Ouch

While browsing through Pinterest recently I got a nice little surprise when I saw someone had pinned something from my blog. So out of interest I looked to see what else may have been pinned. Then I saw a heap of comments after one pic (from my polymer bead necklace tutorial post), starting with the first person's "yeah, not a fan". It then went on to "we make these in bible school. Too childlike" and so on. OK, so not everyone has the same taste, but I wonder why they felt it necessary to make a negative comment. A reasonable amount of what I see on Pinterest is not to my taste but I don't see a need to put someone else down because of it.

This really shouldn't bother me, but it did a little and it got me thinking about how when you put yourself, and your style, taste, likes and dislikes out there for the world to see, I guess you open yourself up to criticism. In my working life as a Graphic Designer I learned to sift through negative comments to work out what the issue was, and take the personal nature out of it. But sometimes it still stung. Maybe it's a hazard of what we do. Maybe it's just my ego.

How do you deal with negativity? Do you let it roll off your back? Are you calm and rational, not taking it on board? Do you write a polite little correcting statement to set the record straight? Or do you feel like emailing that twee-loving, styleless oaf and with a comment back at her "yeah, not a fan" ;-)