Recipe organizer

A couple of months ago I've made this recipe organizer. Once a week at school the kids come together to cook – the same as I'm volunteering to make my weekly crafting workshop, the same two other moms make a cooking workshop. And my little girl and some other little friends of hers attend this class. The result are tasty treats she brings home friday afternoon, but also LOTS of recipe pages we've accumulated over last months.

This organizer wasn't for my girl though – there's a boy in a cooking class and his mom's making it happen and puts lot of love and time, and work into it, so my guess was that they may be in the same situation – LOTS of recipe pages, beautifully prepared and hand colored by kids during pauses inbetween cooking steps. That's how I came up with the idea of organizer.

I've taken a simple cheap organizer from a discounter, a handful of paper napkins with „boyish“ motifs (I simply chosen something that wouldn't be flowers, or any pink and pastel hues in my soon- to-be-huge collections of finnish paper napkins). I had here Marimekko (fish motif), Finlayson (bears and fruit trees), and some other less fancy home decoration brands on hand. 

After it was almost finished I realized I needed separator sheets to break down the mass of transparent page protectors I've put into the organizer, but also to easily find recipes in categories: main meal – meat and fish, side dishes, desserts, and miscellaneous. I've cut the blanc paper to have side flaps on the right side to write/stamp the tags: viande, poisson, legumes, etc. (in french). The napkins I've used for the organizer itself were great here, because I could underline the content with fish, bear, fruit pictures, and some bubble foil print in olive green imitating green peas (vegetables).

Colors are not usual, very much not usual. So I've made a digital collage and a tablette sketch first to see which other colors would work well. I think it's a pretty helpful step and though it's for me like a step-aside, which I'm not always willing to make, and maybe I'm not going to make it each time, it's not that bad. At least for working on projects with some „out-of-my-comfort-zone“ elements involved. They seem less intimidating with this visualisation.

Now we need one more for my little girl. A more "girlish" one. Stay tuned!