Blue Hen Cottage: Boredom Busting Back in the Day and A Vintage Cookbook Journal

When you were young did you learn to cook using one of these?

I did! When we were kids, we used to have to keep ourselves entertained (life was hard before the Internet!). We kept ourselves busy by teaching ourselves how to cook, sew and make things. Remember Pac-o-Fun? I'm pretty sure it was the first craft magazine ever published. My Grandma bought be a subscription and I was beyond excited with I saw it in the mailbox after school. My best friend Cheryl and I would make everything in it and then we'd wait anxiously for the next issue.

We also used to embroider on EVERYTHING! We'd buy our DMC floss for $0.10 at Woolworth's along with those giant books filled with iron-on transfers at Woolworth's. Then, we'd get stitching! Nothing was safe. Nothing was sacred. Chambray shirts (hello '70's!), jeans and pillow cases. Any fabric that was found lying around was fair game. I had the old Coats and Clark book of embroidery stitches from 1964 (another gift from my Granny). I don't know whatever happened to it, but one day I'm going to buy another on E-bay. Just for old time sake.

Anyway... back to boredom busting back in the day. My best friend Cheryl and I made just about every cake and candy recipe in this book. Some turned out pretty good, while others were a complete failure. One time we made a cake that came out of the over hard as a rock. Not to be deterred from creating our own entertainment, we took the hard cake outside and tossed it back and fourth like a Frisbee until we tossed it so high that it ended up on the roof of the garage. Where it remained throughout the entire winter. Rain and all! We were in awe of that "cake" and it's staying power, but at the same time we were baffled as to what had gone wrong when we made it. The problem might have had something to do with the fact that we didn't always follow the directions. We'd just leave an ingredient out if we didn't have it. Our logic was if you only need 1/4 tsp of something (ie: cream of tartar or baking soda), then how important can that ingredient be? I'm happy to say that my cooking skills have improved since then! But that's how you learn. :)

Anyway, getting back to the cookbook...I found one exactly like the one I used to use at a vintage store not long ago. It was missing some of it's pages, but I figured that I might be able to make it into a journal of some kind. Here's what I came up with:

I wanted to maintain the shapes of the pots and pans on the cover because they are a huge part of the charm of these old books for me. I decided to change them out with some scraps of vintage table cloths that I had in my fabric stash. The lids are topped with old, rhinestone buttons. I also happened to have some interesting vintage game cards that referenced foods, so I thought this would be a cute way to incorporate them into a project.

I used vintage tablecloth scraps throughout the book. Here's how it turned out: