Get ready for some homemade gifts this holiday season. Pinterest, and copycat sites, are bringing out the crafter and DIYer in users. Pinterest tells Mashable it’s been popular among crafters and “do-it-yourselfers” since its launch.
“They love using Pinterest as a resource to discover ideas or get inspiration for projects from people around the world who share similar passions,” a Pinterest spokesperson said of the site’s users. “The ‘DIY & Craft’ category on Pinterest is one of our most popular and an endless feed of things people are making, or are inspired by, around the globe.”
They don’t have exact figures about how many people are pinning and re-pinning crafts and DIY projects, but they told us “we have noticed that holiday-related or seasonal crafts are very popular.”
Tracy Mooney is the associate editor of Generation Q magazine and a freelance writer and social media coordinator who specializes in creating Pinterest accounts for companies.
As an active pinner in her free time, too, Mooney says she gets “inspiration for quilt design, for holiday decorating, for recipes” via Pinterest. For her day job working at Kickstarter-funded quilting magazine Generation Q, she said she reads a ton of blogs and sees “the trend of many, many people trying new things because of Pinterest.”
“Pinterest makes you feel creative even when you are just sitting there re-pinning,” she said. “So I am happy that it has inspired so many to give sewing, crafting and DIYing a try. On the other hand, I need to force myself to get off of Pinterest and actually [start] creating.”
In fact, a Mashable reader poll on our Pinterest and Facebook pages showed that people get inspiration from Pinterest … but they don’t necessarily complete the crafts. One commenter said she created a board titled, “Things I’ll actually never make.”
Jo-Ann Fabrics and Craft Stores has nearly 60,000 followers on Pinterest and frequently posts crafting and sewing projects to its page. A spokesperson tells Mashable that Pinterest is the second-highest driver of traffic to the company’s website, just after Facebook.
“Our goal for Pinterest has always been about sharing a ton of inspiration,” said Kimberly Cornuelle, social media specialist at Jo-Ann. “The best part is seeing which pins resonate with our followers.”
