Nothing is more precious than an old, tried and true, family recipe. If you’re struggling with great gifts to give, here are some ideas that come from the heart, not the wallet.
This one works well if you’ve got a lot of family recipes on index cards, scraps of paper, and other disorganized bits that you can never seem to wrangle together into a cohesive book. Take everything out of your shoebox, or whatever else you have it in. Next, scan them into your computer. If you want to add a little something extra to this, try adding a photo of the person whose
Lots of families have cooks famous for something. Maybe your grandmother made amazing chocolate chip cookies. Maybe your aunt’s rhubarb pie is the stuff of legends. Your mom might have made soup stock that rivals the best commercial brands. Great. Put those photos with the recipes. Future generations will be able to put a face with the recipe. If the photo won’t fit on top of the recipe, put it on the bottom. Now, print out the copies. Get some index cards. You’re going to be making a simple recipe book with them. Cut the recipes down to size and use mod podge to glue them to the cards. You can probably stop there, but if you want a water-tight seal so nothing destroys them, laminate the recipes. Use a hole punch and binder rinks, twine or anything else to bind them together. If you want to give multiple copies out as gifts, you’ve got a lot of work in front of you. You could, alternatively, scan everything in, then use blurb.com to make the books. It’s a little more expensive that way, but if you do print at home, load up on ink from Stinkyinkshop.co.uk.
Turn A Handwritten Family Recipe Into A Tea Towel
If you’ve got a favorite recipe you’d like to preserve forever, old handwritten ones make the best tea towels. Spoonflower has a tutorial on how to do this using their custom fabric printing service. Using their service, you can upload images and design your own fabric. That image is then printed and shipped. You can order as many or as few, as you’d like. Linen makes the best fabric for this, aesthetically. But, cotton is more durable. It really depends on whether you want these to be practical or for show only (or Want to give away special picture frames that people will remember? Put well-done replicas of precious family recipes in them. This will work well if you spend time on the details, making sure that the replicas look amazing, and the picture frames are either hand-made or antiqued. It’s more elbow-grease than anything else, but if you’re trying to save money this year, it’s one of the most aesthetically-pleasing gifts your friends and family will get – guaranteed.
