Organising my Recipes

Since moving to London, we have been living in a house without loads of storage.  While the kitchen isn't the smallest one I've ever had, it is seriously lacking in storage.  One of the annoying things, is that there is no space to store recipes and cookbooks.  A great big mess has gradually developed, which is taking up loads of the kitchen bench.  Here's the before photo.

I know it's not really that messy, but it does take up too much space, and it's not easy to find the recipes I want.  I found this terrific inspiration and decided to make a recipe box that's filled with only the recipes I actually use.

Putting together my recipe box was a real labour of love.  It took me weeks of slowly typing up recipes, searching for pictures and creating some cute templates.  I'm not terrific at desktop publishing or digital scrapbooking, so I reverted to something that I actually know how to use - PowerPoint.  Once I had all the recipes ready to go, I sent them off to be printed as 7"x5" photographs.  I finished off by using a punch to round the corners, then I laminated them to make them durable.

I made dividers with some sturdy card and printed up some labels for them (PowerPoint again).  Finally, I carefully cut the dividers out with a craft knife, rounded the corners, and laminated them.  The recipe box proved really hard to find.  London isn't the best place for craft supplies, but I eventually found a pretty Orla Keily CD box, which fitted the cards perfectly.  Just so you can see how much better it is, here are the before and after shots.

It's so tidy!

And check out those gorgeous cards.  I can't believe how beautiful and practical this is.