recipe books

I love spring cleaning. Or, before you get the wrong idea, I love that time of the year when the fields get bloomier, the birds chirpier and the days sunnier - so that those dust particles that were floating just the same way in winter are now more visible, and the windows suddenly look much dirtier. This is the time when other women (alas, not so much me...) feel the urge to start cleaning the house from top to bottom.
Same thing happened to my neighbour this March who, unexpectedly, turned up one day on my doorstep with a Tesco bagful of lovely cross stitch magazines she`d found under her bed, APOLOGISING (bless her!) that some of them didn`t have the freebies in them any more (!). As you can imagine, I didn`t leave my armchair for the next three days until I meticulously went through all the magazines and the other prezzies, from embroidery hoops to magnetic boards to wee "good-for-keeping-anything-in-it" type of very handy boxes. When I finally came up for air, I decided I`d make something for my neighbour to show my appreciation for her kindness, using a cupcake motif I found in one of her magazines. Just the day before I came by a lovely little (blank) recipe book in a charity shop and recalling how my mum and I used to fold the paper for my books in primary school, I managed to make this book cover.

I can happily report that my wee gift was very well received, which spurred me on to make another recipe book cover - that, and the fact that I knew there was another identical blank book in the charity shop which I left there the other day and I simply HATE unfinished business. So anyway, I went back, bought it, and started to flick through my stichy books and magazines (with my recently acquired stash I have over about 200 magazines so "flicking through" them is a roughly 18-hour process).  I only had about a week before going to Hungary for a fortnight to visit my family, spend Gregory`s spring break there and celebrate my granny`s 78th birthday.
Now my gran LOVES cooking. My mum`s a pretty mean cook too and I`m told I`m not bad either (blush, blush...) but with my granny it`s an obsession on a par with my obsession with cross stitch. I think if it wasn`t for her soaps, she would be glued to the Food Channel 24/7, and she must have filled an enormous number of jotters with her favourite recipes so far. So I thought a book like this would be ideal for her and after a long, long search I found this adorable kitty design in the very last magazine I looked at (where else?), and managed to finish stitching it the night before our flight.

I even managed to sqeeze in "My Favourite Recipes" in Hungarian under the picture and covered the whole thing with see-through plastic so as to protect it from the greasy fumes of a kitchen... So where is it now? Probably in my granny`s treasure box under her bed, since the last time I asked she said "it was way too beautiful to spoil it with her scrawly handwriting". Oh, bless!