products

I was sorting through some old recipes torn from magazines and newspapers, saved by my grandma, in an old discolored manila folder. Grandma has been gone since the '80s. I am not one to use recipes. I like to make up my own ingredients and measurements. Actually, I am surprised that my grandma had this file because she often-maybe always- cooked and baked the same way= by the way it looked. I had some favorites that she cooked or baked, and as a teen (thinking I should harvest her knowledge for using myself someday) I asked her several times if she could write it all down for me on a recipe card.

[Recipe cards. Remember those... before you could Goo--e anything you ever wanted to know about anything?]

Her reply was, "I don't know how I would write it all down. I just put it all together until it looks right."

I do have a few recipe cards that each of my grandmas wrote, as well as some my mom wrote. I cherish them more now for their handwritten nostalgia than the instructions they explain. Recognizing the beautiful and individual style of their handwritten script makes me smile.

As I looked through the tattered contents of the folder, I started mindlessly throwing the magazine and newspaper recipe scraps in the waste basket. Surely I would never use them, fire hazzard they were and all that...

Then I suddenly stopped and thought about the great things on those pages that surround these age old recipes. Time capsule-like graphics of products we still recognize dressed in newer labels and those super looking old colors that don't exist anymore in advertising (or book illustrations). I am sucked in by those vintage ink colors every time!!

These old product paper ephemera scraps are fun to use in collage or ATC art for backgrounds. Have fun with these. Compliments of my thrifty grandma, who saved everything and taught my mom to save everything.

Click on image to enlarge it.