An Odd Love Letter to My Grandmother

It's been a long time since I posted. Life happened; you know how it goes...

Three years ago, I found an ugly and beat-up bookcase at a flea market. The guy's child had attempted to remove some of the paint with a powerwasher, resulting in some pretty bad gouging in the wood. It was a mess. We paid $25 for it, and then it sat on our sunporch waiting for me to refinish it.

I knew exactly what I wanted to do with it: I wanted to paint it to resemble the designs on my paternal grandmother's recipe box, I just needed the time and the goose to do it. Mostly, I got tired of looking at it on the sunporch.

It involved more scraping, a lot of sanding, more scraping, and finally coming to the realization that I was never going to get all the old paint off without chemical stripper. Since I was going to paint it anyway, there really didn't seem to be the need to go to that kind of effort, plus I hate that stuff.

Here's what it looked like before:

Interior was painted black. Exterior was painted faded dark red over harvest gold. Ugly.

I filled the worst of the gouges with wood filler, since some of them were on shelves, and I wanted cookbooks not to catch in those gouges, and had to sand those after they dried. After several coats of primer, spray paint for the interior, and several coats of paint for the exterior, I had a white and blue bookcase that looked nothing like it did before.

I then used Photoshop to resize and modify the motifs from her recipe box. Well, sort of hers... Mamaw's recipe box is well-used, and not in pristine condition. I love the design, and had another just like it and scanned it to get the images I needed. I also found a tray on Etsy that Ohio Art made to go with it, because it was apparently a very popular design with several accessories. (Mom even found a watering can for me.)

Here's my inspiration for the motifs that I painted into the insets on the sides, and on the drawers:

I measured each of the insets and the drawers, figured out which motifs I was going to use, and then used Photoshop's "find edges" command so I wasn't printing full color images of what I resized. I then traced those onto tracing paper, and applied the images to the bookcase with graphite paper. I held the tracing and graphite paper on with painter's tape, so the design didn't shift while I was tracing it. The blue bird on the tray above was my fourth motif; to make it I just reversed the pink bird's branch, and swapped the blue one in. The heart from the box lid (left, top image), had to be reduced and squished down a little to make it fit on the round knob. It's also elevated in position on the drawer, in order to get the size I wanted on the drawer without the tulip running off the edge. (Easier to see, below.)

And here is my finished love letter to Mamaw:

Closer look at drawer and sides.

That's not even close to all the cookbooks I have.

Some transformation! I'm incredibly proud of that. With the paint and other materials, it ended up costing more than $25, of course, but I have something that is a giant reminder of my grandmother, that is a functional piece of furniture that goes with my kitchen, and is sturdier shelving for my heavy cookbook collection than the baker's rack I was using (that was starting to lean under the weight -- yikes!).

I suppose what I hope you'll take away from this is the inspiration that your family recipes are more than just the meals. It's the history, and the memories of the people. I feel so very privileged to be The Keeper of the Box. How you honor the memories of those who came before is up to you, but don't limit yourself to cookbooks. Inspiration is everywhere.

The original box.
Because it would not close, and things could not be
removed without fear of damaging them,
everything has been relocated to an acid-free
binder for conservation purposes.

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By the way, if you're hyper-organized, and have a cooperative family, there is time to get a family cookbook put together in time for the holidays. You might make yourself a little nutty, but you can do it! I put ours together starting in October, and had them done by Christmas. (That was 15 years ago, probably time for a new one!)

Available at Amazon.

Cookbooks, Collecting and Displaying

I love cookbooks. I probably have 200 or more (I'm honestly not sure). The older the better, but I also love to buy cookbooks of local cuisine on vacation. I bought a Turkish cooking magazine (in Turkish!) when I visited Istanbul several years ago; I still haven't translated it. It's tough to keep everything organized, to know where everything is and keep track of which one has that awesome recipe for _____.

Some of my older cookbooks are displayed in the dining room, with a small collection of vintage anodized aluminum pieces. The majority of the rest are on a baker's rack that's starting to show some signs of strain under all the weight.

This is an older photo; I've added to them.

A couple of years ago, I bought a battered piece of furniture for $25 -- a sturdy oak (?) bookcase with a couple of small doors. It had been used to house electronics at some point, and had doors that are gone now, but I saw it's potential. It's been sitting on the sunporch waiting for me to finish stripping off the old paint, sand it, and repaint. I love the design of my grandmother's recipe box, I want to use it as the inspiration for this bookcase.

Potential...

I am going to paint it warm white, and in the insets on the sides and on the drawers, use designs that look like this:

This is actually not Mamaw's box,
the condition of hers isn't this good.

Since my kitchen is yellow with accents of red and blue, that will be perfect!

Once it's all finished, I'll have another place for cookbooks and magazines, and can organize them better. That is high on my project list for 2014. Then I can start organizing all the loose recipes I have stashed all over the place, and start the process for another family cookbook. It's been 13 years since the last one; I think it's time.

Available at Amazon.