Pin Up Girls: Easy-to-master painted vases and ranch pork chops

Tessa Duvall & Caitlin Herrington

Tessa:

Every so often comes a pin that just won’t go away.

All the people you follow have repinned it and other slight variations of it to their craft board. It dominates your home screen as soon as you log in to Pinterest.

For me a couple of weeks back, it was painted glass.

Here’s the gist: you take some odd-shaped glass containers (vases, jars, etc.) and just pour paint inside, covering the inner surface completely.

Sounds easy enough — unless you’re me.

If you’re me, you spend 20 minutes in the paint aisle of Hobby Lobby while the store is closing for the night, debating if you want to go with the pin that uses enamel paint or the one that uses latex paint. Oh, and did I need sealant? And then there’s the colors. What colors are my walls again?

Hurried by the announcements from the loudspeakers, I decided on enamel paint in bright blue, yellow and white — one 2-oz. bottle of each.

Over the course of the previous week, I’d gotten a couple of vases at home, a honey jar from my roommate and five from Goodwill and The Consignment Corner on Indianola Street.

In total, the paint (on sale, score!) and the glass cost about $10. Buying used glass meant it wasn’t in pristine condition (and kind of gross at times), but it’s nothing a little Dawn and hot water can’t fix.

Actually painting the glass was easy enough, but it took longer than I expected because the paint was thick. Just squeeze paint around the opening of your container, then tap and swirl until all the insides are coated. Once you’ve done that, lay the container on its side and rotate it every 15 minutes or so to keep paint from pooling on the side.

After drying, only small bubbles appeared, but nothing that was visible when the vases were put on my bookshelf.

Finally — a successful pin.

Caitlin:

I have a thing for crock pots. The one I currently use is my mom’s and likely older than I am, but it still cooks with the best of them.

The notion of just tossing in a few ingredients in the morning, leaving for the day and coming home to a delicious, hot meal waiting for me when I return makes me absolutely giddy — especially because I’m rarely home. (Just ask my roommate. I think I see her twice a week.)

So, when I ran across a few of my favorite flavors combined into one via magical slow cooking, I jumped on it. And thus, ranch pork chops became a regular part of my diet. They’re so easy, y’all. So, so easy. All you need is a can of cream of chicken soup, a packet of ranch dressing powder mix and some pork chops.

That’s it. Seriously.

The original recipe calls for six pork chops, but I only used four (Because that’s all I had.). You throw those three ingredients in the crock pot, turn it on low and walk away for six hours. Then come home to deliciousness.

Mine were a little too salty, but that might have been because I was short two slices of meat. I now use slightly less ranch powder, and that seems to have solved the problem.

Regardless, these made the list of go-to foods. I may even try to find a Pin for homemade ranch powder to save a little money. Let’s be honest, it’s probably out there somewhere in the land of Pinterest.

Don’t forget that you can send pins to us at [email protected] and have us test them out!