Hello lovlies :-) I'm so sorry I've been absent for so long. It's been kinda hectic in my house lately.
Not to worry, though...that hectic atmosphere has led to a few creative things happening around here, starting with fun recipe cards that I made last week (which you got a glimpse of on Instagram).
Most people have recipe card boxes, which come with cards. I'm one of those people. I have all kinds of recipes (most of them related to baking), and keep my box handy on a shelf above my counter.
I had the chance to write down one of my FAV.O.RITE recipes for some friends recently, and decided that they should get something different from the recipe cards I have in my box.
Now, we all know about my rather ridiculous obsession with kraft paper. Naturally, this had to be part of my recipe card endeavor. Because, well....it's awesome....and there really doesn't have to be any other reason than that in my book.
Since with kraft paper, you can do pretty much whatever you want to it, I got out my watermark stamp pad, and a flowery stamp.
I inked the stamp with the watermark inkpad, and stamped only along the edges of the kraft paper.
Since I want these to be used as actual recipe cards, I cut them slightly smaller than 4x6 (you'll see later why) so that, when complete, they'll fit into a standard recipe box with no problem. You can see my stamping along the edges, which I did totally at random; no rhyme or reason to how I decided to place the stamp.
After stamping the image, I took my heat embossing gun, and dried the ink. This caused the ink to set just a little bit darker than it would have had I let it dry by itself.
Plus, I'm impatient, and I wanted them to be dry immediately.
Ahem.
This is the part where I had to stop the creative process (which is never a good thing, but for this project, it was necessary) and go handwrite the recipes onto the front of the cards.
Once that was done, I went back up to my project table, and cut pieces of scrapbook paper for backing for the cards.
Ta da! I'm not done yet, though.....shocking, I know. I have a YourStory machine, which doesn't just bind books........it laminates.
If you own a label maker, you know the kind of obsessive behavior that comes along with it - you want to label EVERYTHING in your house. Not just one thing...everything. Same goes with laminating - I legit have to reign in my compulsion to laminate every gd thing I see..."just because".
Not this time, though. No one likes their recipe cards to get all mangled and gross from sitting on the counter while you're throwing flour, sugar, eggs, etc. all over the place. A perfect reason to laminate these - protective coating.
Unfortunately, I forgot to take a pic of the back of the card - the scrapbook paper I used was double-sided, so the back at least had a design on it, even though I left it blank. I wrote "From the kitchen of," put my name, sent 'em through to get laminated, tied each one with a pretty ribbon, and gave it away :-)
There you have it! Simple, pretty, handmade recipe cards that took (minus the writing of the recipe) about 10 minutes each to complete. Give it a try next time one of your friends asks for one of your recipes!
You don't have to use the watermark inkpad like I did, but by using it, you can write over the stamped image if you're pressed for space like I was. You could do something just as simple as stamping a colored image in one of the corners, and writing all around it. You can distress the edges. Anything! And, if you don't have a way to laminate the cards, no bigs! There are protective sleeves you can get that are a perfect fit. It's seriously so simple to make a personalized card like this to give to someone :-)
Much love ~~~
