Homemade Recipes Reference Box

I love homemade and I much rather make something myself. Especially if it also means a safer product and saving money. Thanks to Pinterest and my general research (but mostly Pinterest) I’ve gathered a ton of recipes for all things natural and homemade.

But as I started to make some of these things I discovered a problem. I was jotting the recipes down when I went to go use them, but then I was ending up with a pile of scribbled recipes on post-it notes, the back of reused envelopes, and scrap paper. I also released I was finding it hard to track down a specific recipe I wanted quickly among the 100 plus pins on my board. Or I had returned the book it was found in to the library.

I needed a way to organize and save all these recipes.

Enter the homemade recipes reference box.

Otherwise known as, a hacked regular old recipe box that holds recipes for do-it-yourselfing to the extreme.

I simply bought a pretty recipe box off of Amazon.com and reinvented it. Here’s how I did it.

I started by creating a template in Apple’s Pages software (if you want it, just ask, but it will only work in Pages, sorry if you’re stuck with Microsoft Word). I actually started making the cards before I bought the box, but knew I wanted to create cards that would fit in a 4×6 box. Unfortunately, the standard 8.5×11 paper size doesn’t cater to this well, so I settled on 4×5.5 inch cards so that I could get four cards out of each page.

Then I started typing. And typing.

And typing.

I probably had close to 100 recipes typed before I actually printed them out. They are just printed on regular old white card stock.

This is what I then used to develop my categories. After I had cut them all down with my paper cutter, I sorted them in to piles with like recipes. I then tried to figure out general categories. Some were easy, like hair care or household, but others were more difficult. I also realized I needed subcategories. I used 4×6 index file card guides for this.

The categories I ended up with are:

• Personal Care (with oral and facial care subcategories)
• Skin Care
• Hair Care (with clean, condition, treat, and style subcategories)
• Make-Up
• Household (with kitchen, bathroom and laundry subcategories)
• Healthcare (with first aid, girly stuff, outdoors, and sickness subcategories)
• Baby and Child
• Pet Care

You can obviously make your own categories, or make adjustments to my list to suit your needs.

As I’ve continued to add recipes, I’ve sometimes added a subcategory, and these will probably continue to evolve and change as I continue to use it.

Right now my box has about 150 recipes in it, and I can foresee need to add another box eventually. But for now, it works great!

I have recipes that cover most of the basics and have found myself reaching for the box when looking for a solution to something (which is the whole idea, right). I’ve even been on the phone with someone a couple times and found myself telling them “hold on, I have a recipe for that!” Of course that’s usually followed by, “um, I don’t have any of those ingredients.” I need to get my friends a little more crunchy.

I’ve also found it a very helpful way to find areas where I’m lacking recipes and even add to my ingredients stockpile. I can make most the basics, but there’s a lot of specialty ingredients I don’t have. I’ve started to keep a running list, based on the recipes in my box, which is helpful when I go to place an order for something, but need to add a few items in order to make shipping worth it.

Now I know what you’re thinking. It’s “I really hope she’s going to share a download of all those recipes,” it’s it? I really wish I could honestly, but because they are not my own, I don’t feel that it would be right to do so. You can however find most all the recipes (except for the few I copied from books borrowed from the library) on my Pinterest boards. That will save you the time of hunting for them yourself. (If you need a Pinterest invite, just ask!) I was actually surprised at how little time it took me to type up a page of cards. It depended some on what the recipes were, but it wasn’t nearly as daunting as I thought it might be.

As I add my own recipes, I’ll try to type up pages of printable recipes so that my recipes are at least ready to go. Some other bloggers do this too, and usually in the 4×6 format, so keep and eye out for that too.

Please don’t think I sat down and did this all at once either. I’ve actually been working on it for months. Sometimes I’ll sit down and type up a page or two. Other times I’ll type 6-7 pages. I’ve just slowly been going at it.

It’s an ongoing project that will continue probably indefinitely.

And that’s half the idea.

Pretty Pastel Pinwheels – for baby

Back in the fall, shortly after I finally finished my sister’s quilt, I made one for my boyfriend’s youngest niece. This quilt was actually a year overdue as I had intended to give it to her when she was born. I was in the middle of my final semester in school however and simply did not have time to make it. Although had I been smart I would have made it in the summer, but I mean, why think ahead like that or anything. So she got it for her first birthday instead. I don’t think she particularly cared.

I actually had purchased the backing fabric along with two of the other fabrics the summer before she was born, but had never gotten around to finding more fabric for the blocks. About a month before her birthday, thinking I was all awesome and planning ahead, I picked the rest of the fabrics.

And then I waited until four days until her birthday to get started.

Genius!

(Sounds familiar, no?)

Needless to say, I never wanted to see another pinwheel again once I was done. I actually finished stitching the binding the day of her party.

Thank heavens I had happened to see this fast and easy way to make pinwheels when researching patterns for my sister and it saved some major time. I still had to cut my squares but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have made my deadline otherwise.

Overall I’m happy with how it turned out. I wish the contrast was better though. See how those squares with the gray polka dots really pop out? I wish it was more like that in every square. I thought that choosing fabrics was going to be easy, however it turned out to be way more challenging than I thought. I was basing the color scheme off the backing, which was very pastel-y. Turns out it hard to find fabric with those pastel-y colors but in the end, I should have been looking some darker tones too. Oh well, lesson learned.

I also learned that planning each block and making a bunch of the same ones would have been a smarter plan of attack than putting together each one at random. Because of that, I had to no easy way to lay it out, and it ended up taking me forever to lay it all out. After doing my sister’s though, it was still felt so quick to put together.

I wish I could tell you the dimensions, but honestly, I cannot remember. It was something around 40″x40″. Pinwheels are pretty easy to put together, so I think this would be an easy quilt for a beginner. As always, I recommend keeping it small, especially if you are new to sewing in general.

As always, feel free to ask questions if you have them!

Homemade Christmas: The Epic Play Castle

I was back this year with my traditional, mostly homemade Christmas gifts. Although actually this was really a birthday gift, the birthday boy’s big day is two weeks before Christmas, so he (along with the two other December birthdays) usually gets his gift on Christmas day.

Back in the fall I started looking around for gift ideas. I wish I could tell you how I landed on this persons Etsy page, but I can’t. All I know is I saw this awesome wooden modular play castle, thought it was pretty epic, and then texted my other half to ask him how easy it was to make. His response was “piece of cake.” Don’t ask him about it now.

(Search on Etsy for Modular Wooden Castle for the original product)

I would have bought the original from the source, however it was quite out of budget and hey, it’s way cooler to be able to say you made it yourself anyways.

We started back before Thanksgiving thinking “look at us getting a head start and all so we aren’t stressed out about trying to finish such a large project days before Christmas while simultaneously trying to finish about 20 something other gifts.”

(That’s foreshadowing by the way in case you didn’t pick up on it.)

Our first step was a run to Home Depot. We used a 4′x8′ piece of Birch plywood. Supposedly they are only suppose to make minimum cuts of something like 12″, but we managed to get the guy to cut the piece down to 6″,7″ and 8″ widths. If you decide to make this, hopefully you’ll be able to talk them into the same, because it did save us a ton of time and trouble. Tommy, using is mathematical genius, determined how many of each width we needed based on the templates I had drawn up.

Next step was to take all the pieces and cut them again. Depending on the piece, some were cut into the heights, while some the widths. Again, Tommy and the table saw were the masterminds behind this.

And that was the last time anything was easy. Tommy’s plan was to use a router to cut the notches in each piece used to slide them together. Because of the way it fits together you want at least half of your pieces to be flat on both sides so you can flip them upside down (confused? Look at the pictures to follow). So logically he started off on our short plain pieces… and then the router broke and everything came to screeching halt.

The end result was putting it off until a week before Christmas, then struggling through about half the remaining pieces with a semi-broken router and then finally purchasing a new router. All a week before Christmas.

Tommy did all the detail work (zig-zag tops, doors, and windows), but with my lack of woodworking knowledge and the fact that I was not present when he did it, I have no clue has to how exactly he did it. All I know is he did it, and that’s all I really cared about at the moment. Our original plans also included some pieces with square notches, however the points were much faster to make so with the time crunch he just did all of them that way.

While he was finishing with the new router, I sanded my heart out and then we both finished the last 20 or so pieces. We finally finished around 2am on Wednesday the 21st (yes, 4 days before Christmas).

Of course, despite the fact that it was 2am we had to put it together.

Yup, pretty epic!

The sets I had seen online consisted of either 18 or 28 pieces. Ours came to a grand total of 60 pieces. Yeah… little overboard, but that’s how we roll. I wish I had taken a picture of all the different style pieces stacked up, but unfortunately I didn’t. Sorry.

I finished each piece with a beeswax and olive oil polish (recipe here) which took an alarming four hours to do, but was worth it because it gave the pieces a nice smooth finish and feel and deepened the color a bit. After I finished I sat them all up to dry for 24 hours and then wiped off the excess.

The sealed pieces are stacked.

I also added two “draw bridges” from scraps of wood and used my wood burner to add the details.

I even (badly) burned our initials and the year into one of the tower pieces.

The last touch was some grass and the moat from inexpensive, silky fabric from JoAnns which I hemmed on my sewing machine.

Some play castle characters were also added to the mix. And voila! An epic play castle.

It was a big hit Christmas day, with at one point, all 6 of the nieces and nephews in it. The two oldest (7 and almost 7) enjoyed helping to build, while the two middle ones (pictured above, the birthday boy who turned 3 and his cousin who is 4 1/2) played in it the whole time it was up and cried when it had to be put away to go home. The two youngest (who are 2 and 13 months) were still a bit too young to really enjoy it.

While the project wasn’t necessarily difficult to execute, it was time consuming and you’ll need a basic knowledge of woodworking as well as quite a few tools. But overall it was a fun project (okay in the middle of it I probably wouldn’t have said that) and the results were awesome. Which is why when we gave it away, we actually stated that when it’s life with them was over, we wanted it back!

Beg and plead all you want, but we have zero plans of making these to sell. One, because it’s not our original idea so that wouldn’t be right, and two, it’s just way to time consuming to be worth it, at least to us. Tommy vowed “never again!” when we finished, which again, is why we asked for it back one day.