I Love My Pin Pals!

When Mary Anderson-Ford began posting on Pinterest, she had no idea it would lead to an exciting and enriching new set of friends.

- Stephanie Clarkson

Anyone crossing the lobby of the Gansevoort hotel in New York on 20 April last year would have been met by the sight of seven ladies throwing themselves into each other’s arms, whooping and weeping with joy. They might have thought it a family reunion or old school friends meeting up. In fact, our group spans three different continents and, until that moment, none of us had ever actually met in person. Having met each other online through Pinterest, we have become Pin Pals – long-distance pen pals for the digital age!

I discovered Pinterest in 2012 at a time of extreme sadness and stress. My great friend and sister-in-law, Laura, had been diagnosed with incurable breast cancer while pregnant. She had a mastectomy, and they delivered her daughter, Grace, six weeks early so they could commence treatment. Grace then contracted meningitis; at the same time my mother-in-law had pneumonia. We had three members of the same family in different wards of the same hospital. It was an absolutely dreadful time.

When life turns dark, it’s particularly difficult to read people’s sunny posts

on websites like Facebook, so I started looking at different sites and discovered Pinterest. I had loved scrapbooks as a child, and the idea of an online version appealed to me. It’s a site that isn’t about bragging or oversharing every piece of your life; instead, it’s somewhere you can be creative. For me, at that bleak time, it offered an hour or so of solace. I created boards based on colour, ‘pinning’ pictures reflecting a certain shade to create a visual feast. Putting these together brightened up my day.