Save a Recipe – creative ways to save family and vintage recipes

As DIY’ers, crafters, scrapbookers and paper crafters, we spend a lot of time preserving photos, old documents and memories of the past, but one area that can sometimes get overlooked are the cards, books and sheets of paper filled will recipes.  These handwritten or hand typed recipes from parents, grandparents or passed down generation to generation that still may be on the original papers in the original handwriting are so worth preserving.  These memories are not only amazing to view, but are also part of our family heritage and fill the plates at holiday meals, traditional Sunday dinners or that birthday dinner you have had since you were a child.

There may also only be one copy, but these recipes have meaning to all of your siblings or close relatives, so finding creative ways to duplicate those one of a kind recipes is important, so if you have drawers filled will handwritten recipes or you have copies of old recipes, now is the time to get them organized and create a recipe memory or two.

This blog post is the start of a series where we will be featuring creative ways to store, organize, preserve and share recipes we love.  Here are a few housekeeping ideas to share before the creativity begins

1. Preserve – before you begin you will want to scan and or make copies of your found recipes.  The are precious and delicate, so keeping a copy before the creativity begins is so critical.  We suggest using a scanner verses taking taking photos on a smartphone or camera.  Make sure the scan bed is clean and that your recipe is dust free and as flat as possible.  Don’t worry if your recipe cards have love stains, these give them their special personalities.  Scan the fronts and backs together keeping them as organized as possible.

2. Organize – After scanning your found recipes you can decide if you will be using them for your projects or saving them for the future, either way you will want to name each file and organize them either by family, by course, by date, etc.  You can organize the original recipe cards in the same category options.  You may want to choose an organization that matches the way you like to cook, weekend recipes, quick weekday recipes and holiday recipes or by appetizers, side dishes and main dishes all mixed together.

3. Create – you can put your recipes back in the recipe box you found them in or back into the yellowed recipe album or you can create something special that will keep your recipes archival safe.  Below we will share some creative ideas to get the juices flowering.  You may choose to use the scanned copies of your recipes, handwrite them onto new recipe cards or preserve the original recipes in your projects.

4. On Display – for more creative ideas you will find some great ways to display the most previous of recipes on Pinterest like this board we found Saving Family Recipes

We also found this great Facebook Page to follow Vintage Recipes.  At Vintage Recipes you will find recipes, food related art, videos, housewares and cookbooks from the 1920’s to the 1980’s.  Like this Mind Your Manners vintage art.  This page is filled with great ideas, recipes, ephemera and inspiration.    

We challenged our Creative Crew to share their ideas on how to save recipes in clever and creative ways and the projects are just amazing.  We will be sharing each of the projects over the next few months in our series Save a Recipe.  We hope that this series and our products inspire you to dive into your recipe archives and save the beautiful handwritten recipes you find from the past so they are preserved forever.

Tatiana Klimshina who resides in KhantyMansiysk, Russia (we love having a crew that spans the globe) created this perfect little book for recipes.  An ideal option when handwriting your recipes is how you will preserve them.  You can create one or many of these books, making them perfect holiday gifts, sister gifts or even a welcome gift to a new bride into the family.

Recipe books do not have to be traditional kitchen colors, they can take on your creative style and artistic view letting them stand out as works of art.  Tatiana fussy cut the kitchen gadgets and art from our Farmhouse Kitchen on kraft paper and our new Pots & Pans Paper from the Canvas Corp Farmhouse Kitchen Collection and combined with canvas, soft pinks and vintage embellishments, the extra layers of burlap also give so much depth to this project.  You will also find the mini cutlery charms from 7gypsies peeking out of the tangles, they are the perfect touch.

Fussy cutting Canvas Corp papers creates instant embellishments that can be layered, easily to create amazing book covers or inside page embellishments.  Tatiana’s choice of vintage kitchen linens in her photos takes us to kitchen of the past.

When making a book you have a choice on how you will bind it, Tatiana’s choice was a spiral book, which sets the tone for a very vintage feel and keeps all the recipes together.  The only downside is you cannot move the pages around very easily, but you can easily flip to the recipe of choice and you book stays open to the correct page.  There are many binding systems on the market you can look into that make this process very easy.  The Zutter Bind-it-All Version 2.0 is a handy little tool that will help you bind your small books with metal coils.  You can visit their website for all the details, you can use your favorite binding tool or visit a local printer and ask them about their binding equipment.

Bind-it-All Version 2.0

The inside pages of this little recipe book are filled with our recipe cards with the inside front cover created the Farmhouse Market on Ivory.

A page of recipe cards has 6 different cards each measuring 4″x6″ wide, you can add as many recipe card pages to your book as you desire.  The cardstock weight allows each card to be a page.  You can glue them back to back or leave the backside blank to add additional recipe details.  Your mini book is now ready to be filled with handwritten recipes in your native language or translated from the languages of our families past to your language of today.

 also available in black and white recipe cards.

Looking for products to create inspire your recipe project, flip through the pages of our recipe and cooking related craft products.  We have two offerings that might suit your needs, Farmhouse Kitchen from Canvas Corp

or go vintage kitchen with the 7gypsies Epicurean Collection.  Both cross over in many ways, but individually let you find your own style.

Check out these great projects and leave us a note with the name of your favorite family recipe and we will be sending two lucky winners recipe rescue prizes filled with papers and embellishments to help you save special recipes.  Winners will be picked May 15, 2015.  Stay tuned for more great recipe saving ideas.

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