Online Recipe Box and Cards

 

I love technology. Between work, blogging, and using my smart phone, it seems like my day revolves around screens and the internet. I'm not sure what I did back when I had just a flip phone that could play two games. While most of technology is great, occasionally I think there are a few things that we lose in this digital age. When is the last time you put vacation photos in an album, or looked through a friend's photo album of current pictures? I'm sure some of you still print out your pics. But, for most of us, our pics may be in an "album," but it's the digital kind on our computer. Now don't get me wrong, I love that I can catch up with friends and see their pictures on Facebook. But, we've never even printed off our honeymoon pics - that was a year ago!

In an age of unlimited data at your finger tips, it seems like the days of keeping your family recipes on cards in a recipe box isn't as prevalent either. Now, again, I love that I have a whole web full of recipes at my disposal. I pull up recipes on my phone (safely free of water with my handy iPhone kitchen stand) and look at them that way. I occasionally pull out a recipe book, but I can definitely say I have never pulled out a recipe card from a box. I remember my mom had a collection of cards passed down to her with some family recipes written out. She shared some with me a few months ago. I had never even met some of these family members, but I felt a connection with them seeing their recipes and imagining them preparing the food for their families. I've been thinking lately how special it would be to have my recipes in a book, or recipe box, to pass on to future generations some day. By then, who knows if they will be able to read my blog - maybe the internet will be old news and an even newer technology will exist!

So...all that to say, I decided to start a project of making a recipe box filled with all the recipes from my blog. Now this will take a while to type them all out, and print/cut them. But, I saw an adorable idea online of how to make some recipe card templates using my favorite tool, PicMonkey! I'm not sure who originally came up with the idea (I saw it online a lot), but I thought it sounded fun! I made my own template and am slowly going through them. Instead of writing them out, I'm filling them out in a cool handwriting font on the site. My hand writing is not great, so I'm fine with that! They may be digital recipe cards, but I do plan on printing them out and having a physical box as well.

I shared this with you for two reasons:

1. I made a fun new feature on my blog using these cards
2. I'm sharing the steps to make these, in case you too would like to make some templates

First, I want to show you my new feature! I'm slowly going to make cards for all my recipes. But for future posts, they will always be included at the bottom of the post. I also have the recipe cards in a digital recipe card box. You may have noticed the checkered recipe box off to the right hand side of my blog.

If you click on the box, it "opens" up a page filled with my cards. You can download, save, or share these with friends! I'm so excited for people to use this new feature!

Now, some of you might want to make your own recipe cards. If so, here are just a few easy to steps to make these.

 Recipe Card Instructions:

• Open a photo, it doesn't matter what it is, or what size (as long as it's larger than 4x6
• Crop down to a 4x6 photo in PicMonkey

 

• Rotate to be horizontal

 

• Cover the picture with a white rectangle

 

• Add in text for "Recipe," "Directions," and "Ingredients"

 

• Add in other details to make the recipe card your own

 

• Save this as a template, each time you want to make a recipe card you can just open the file and edit 
• When making a card, choose one of the handwriting fonts, to give it that hand written look. OR you can print out the template and write them by hand!  

 

• Some recipes are long, so I made a template for the "back" of the card

 
Thanks for checking these out! Feel free to download and share my recipes. I just ask that you keep the "Sarah Lynn's Sweets" on the card and give credit (mainly for the ones that are my own creation).

Don't forget to check back soon as I will be continuing my I Dream of Ice Cream series later this week with a cake batter recipe. It's currently chilling, I cannot wait to try it!