How to handle Pinterest?

Pinterest, love it or hate it, is becoming an increasingly large part of the idea-space for all sorts of things, including the sort of historic costuming and re-creation things I post here. I'm probably late to this party, but I have noticed that a significant fraction of my incoming traffic comes from there (well, less so here than on my photo archive over at Flickr). For the record, I neither love nor hate Pinterest - I'm just trying to sort out how best to make use of it.

Let's be clear: I have no problem with my stuff being pinned. There are reasons why I post my photos under Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND specifically), and one of them is to allow people to use and share my work, with the major condition that it include proper attribution and linkback.

But there are a few things I'm struggling to figure out with Pinterest. One of the big ones is how to stay involved in the conversation about my work. If someone comments here, or at the photos, I get that feedback, and I can respond if I want to. If someone re-pins or comments on my photos on Pinterest, though, I may never notice. I don't see the traffic until someone actually clicks through, and my suspicion is that's actually a pretty small fraction of the activity. Do I continuously search Pinterest for myself to keep tabs on things (or automate that with Google alerts)? Would that even work (aside from the awkward vanity aspect)?

What about items that are pinned in ways that are potentially misleading? There's a dress of mine on a board that's nominally about a drastically different culture (different place, 400-500 years apart!) I'm not representing my work as being the style of that culture, but people who don't dig down might not know that. That's not even getting to the potential issue of things posted without attribution, and although I'm really hoping that's not a big issue, it's dark matter to me - if it's not attributed to me, I'll probably never see it. I get the impression, though, that users are getting a bit better about proper linking than they were in the early days of the site (wishful thinking?)

None of these things are really unique to Pinterest - they were all issues to consider before as well - but Pinterest has made it so much easier, so the volume is higher and it's harder to ignore. There's also the potential to leverage the site for additional exposure. I've considered preemptively pinning everything I post here, for example, on a blatant self-promotion board. Would that be in terribly poor form? Or just completely ineffective?

If there are any creators with input or suggestions about how to handle your work on Pinterest, I'd be interested to hear them.

Birgitta cap - wrap up

Birgitta cap - worn
Originally uploaded by Catrijn.

I had planned to put up a diagram for my interlacing pattern before I showed what it looks like on, but I just haven't had time to sit down and do the technical drawing. So here you have it, what the cap looks like in practice.

As you can see, especially with the folds at the sides, it's a little bit too big. I made mine noticeably bigger than the original, and I think that ultimately the right size for me would be about halfway between the two. But I really love it anyway :)

I have so many things I want to start next, and not enough time for any of them...