I had planned on sharing a new pie recipe today, but yesterday I showed a picture on Facebookof an item in my new kitchen that I love and many of you asked if I could share what I did to make them.
So, I will be sharing the new pie recipe tomorrow. Today, you are getting a little look at my new kitchen and one of the things I love about it.
I am going to share about my new kitchen and what we did soon. There are a few things left to do, just cosmetic things, but things that I want to fix before I share photos on my site, so today I am just sharing one area of my kitchen.
One of the things we choose not to change in the kitchen was the windows. The window I am showing today is in a bit of an odd spot, but it lets in so much light and moving windows is not cheap, so we kept the window and I am making it work.
The colors are kind of off in the photos today due to the bright light coming in when I took pictures.I love the amount of natural light I have in the kitchen. It makes working in the kitchen so nice. It is not so nice for taking photos of the kitchen, but it functions great when we are in the kitchen, so I cannot complain.
This is a large window and we have tall ceilings, so there is a large space above the window that I knew I wanted to decorate. My goal with the new kitchen was to keep the design and decor simple, so I did not want to put a lot above the window.When it comes to decorating my house I like things that mean something and I wanted to keep that in mind with the kitchen area also.
One day when I was looking around Etsy, I noticed a few shops that were selling recipes printed on canvas and I instantly loved the idea. However, they were a bit expensive and they were just basic recipes for apple pie and other recipes that I had no idea where they came from. I wanted to find a way to get the same look with my favorite recipes.
I did some research and found a few companies that will take recipes you choose and print them on canvas, but again it was a bit expensive. The rest of my kitchen was quite a project and I needed to keep the cost on the decor down, so if I wanted recipes printed on canvas I was going to have to find a way to do it myself.
And really it was not hard at all to figure out. If I can do this, anyone can do this.
Ok, well I will say it is easy if you have basic computer skills and have used a program like photoshop. If you can’t do that, maybe you can find a friend or relative that can help you.
The first thing I had to do was choose the recipes. I wanted recipes that meant something to me, so I decided to use family recipes that had been passed on to me.
I choose my husband’s grandmother’s butter rum cake, my grandmother’s rock cookies, my mom’s coconut bars, my mother in-laws custard, my peanut butter baked oatmeal, and a no bake cheesecake recipe that my mom made all the time and that came from my best friend’s mom.
I did the design work in Photoshop. Now, I know a little bit about Photoshop, but I have a lot to learn, this though was pretty easy. I am sure you could use a similar program also.
All I did was pick a colored background and added the recipe by typing it in how I wanted.
I wanted some of the pictures to be neutral type colors so I went with different shades of brown for three of them.For the other colors I decided to match them to some of my Fiestaware dishes. It is hard to tell in the pictures, but the colors are pretty close to the red, cobalt blue, and green of Fiestaware. That one below is blue, not sure why it looks gray. And the walls are an off-white and not at all like the picture looks.
I wanted to make them a little fun, so I used several different fonts on each print, but you could easily do just one if you want more of a classic look. I saved the image as a jpeg, making sure to allow enough room on the sides of the print to wrap around the canvas.
Now, this took some time for me to get it just right, but it was worth the time I spent to get the look I wanted for a price I was willing to spend.
Once I had them just how I wanted, I uploaded the jpeg image to the Sam’s Club website just like you would a photo. When you choose a canvas for the printing, you can preview the image to be sure your margins are right. I choose to print them on 8×10 canvas, but you could easily do these larger or smaller.
I think if I had looked around I could have found a better price than Sam’s Club, but Sam’s Club only cost me $12.96 for an 8×10 print and I thought that was a good deal. Prices may vary on that depending on your Sam’s Club, but you should easily be able to do it for $20 or less.
I noticed with these pictures, that the canvas prints don’t photograph well, but in person they are very clear and look great.
I now have some fun and unique wall art that means something to me. Every time I see these I think of my family. And since they are recipes, they are perfect for a kitchen.
One of my readers asked on Facebook if you could also do this with hand written recipes and I think you could. In fact, I think that is a great idea. You should be able to scan the recipes in and do the same basic thing in Photoshop or another program to give it a background and turn it into a jpeg. For a hand written recipe you might just need to do a smaller size to keep it clear.
Have any of you seen this done before? I would love to hear your thoughts.
And if any of you computer graphic design type people have suggestions of better ways to do this, I would love to hear. I totally just figured out how to do this as I went along. There may have been an easier way.
