Altered cookbooks, making memories

My mother passed away in 2010, in her late eighties, but I can often get a vivid sense of her when I open her old red, handwritten recipe book. There are the foods of my childhood..the liptauer cheese, the apple dumplings and the weekly baking delights. She has cut out recipes from magazines, handwritten recipes from friends and family, with comments as to what works.

My own recipes were jumbled in a file box... I had (what I thought) was a great idea - I would alter an old microwave cookbook - the sort we got when microwaves were the latest thing, and no one really knew how to use them, so instead of sending it to a charity shop, I started pasting in recipes. I'm not precious about it - really choosing an order that I like, and at the end will write up a new index. But at the moment I have kind of followed the cookbook's order. I love it! It has that fat feeling of something handmade. And I can add quirky things like stamps, recipes written on old envelopes, little drawings, quotes. It's a bit like a journal.

Awaiting an arty new cover

Altered cookbook

I want to leave some of my own recipes for people to remember me by - and in an upcycled book is even better.