Recipe Cards

I have had a Home Management Binder for a while. I have a section for recipes and dinner ideas, as well as weekly meal planning.

Here is my problem. For some reason, my recipe sheets don't seem to stay nice and neat in there. I get food on them or they get ripped out after using them often. I know this could be fixed with simply putting them into plastic sleeves. BUT my issue is also that I find it cumbersome to have my big binder on the counter, and I have at times taken the sheets out, but they didn't seem to make it back to my binder. I'm really bad at that. I also simply WANT a nice little recipe box to keep on my counter.

I've also for years had this little tin box laying around the house. I kept finding it everywhere, even in the garden, full of mud. I always felt bad about throwing it out and thought I should really do something with it. This box had been with me through 2 or 3 moves. Like I said in my previous post, I am quite bad at attaching sentimental value to something that doesn't mean anything. In the back of my head I kept thinking, "Well, I can't throw it out now, after all these years and history of finding it everywhere in my house, surely I can use it for something".

Well, wrong thinking, like all organizers will tell you, I should have thrown it out a long time ago..... BUUUUT....now I HAVE finally found a use for it and I am quite quite happy with it. Sooo, don't follow my example of keeping around something that you don't use for years, but please do follow my example of finding a use for something that might end up in a landfill. lol

So here is what I've done with my little container. I've turned it into my little recipe card container. The outside of it use to be just like the utensil holder you can see on the right of it in the picture.

When I was in school, I made a large wood cabinet and I made the doors as frames with chicken wire in the center. My teacher told me to use GUN BLUE to make the chicken wire look older.

This is exactly what I used on this little tin box. Now it looks like it has some history. I might do the same to the utensil holder, I'll see.

For my recipe cards, I bought some antique look, parchment paper. I made up recipe cards in a Word Document. I then cut out the cards (4/page) and placed them inside a laminating sheet and laminated them. You must leave enough room between the cards so you can have a border of plastic running around each of them. This makes them last longer.

Lastly I added and an old vintage paperclip on the back of the box. This allows me to easily follow a recipe by setting it on the paperclip as you can see in the picture. (I originally was gonna drill a hole in my box and screw the paperclip upside down onto it, so it would hold my cards tight, but it didn't seem to hold them at the right angle. So I let the paperclip hold onto the box and let the card sit on top and it was the right angle and the card didn't seem like it was gonna fall over.) I also added a 2 inch Styrofoam block at the bottom of the box as my cards were a bit short and I wanted them to stick out more.

With time I'll be adding more and more cards as I find recipes I like.