The Frame Came Out of the Barn Attic

There is one wall in my pantry that nothing would fit on.

It needed something flat. Nothing with depth, nothing that stuck out, nothing that would catch an elbow on the way past with a full jar in each hand.

So I went looking for something I already had.

The frame was in the attic of our barn. It had been sitting up there long enough that I don’t know who put it there. Inside it was a picture of a cardinal, behind broken glass.

I took the glass out. The cardinal went in the trash. What was left was a piece of barnwood that was already the exact color I would have tried to paint it.

That is the whole reason this project exists. I needed to fill a wall, and I decided to fill it with things that were already in the house.

The recipes are not mine

I collect vintage cookbooks.

I find them at estate sales, usually in a box on the floor, usually the last thing anybody wants. I buy them when I see them.

The reason I keep buying them is what’s inside. Not the printed recipes. The things people tucked in.

A newspaper clipping folded into the pie chapter. A recipe card slid into the front cover. Somebody’s handwriting on the back of an envelope, sitting in a book on a card table at a stranger’s estate sale.

I don’t know who any of these women were. There is a card in the frame with a printed line that says Recipe from Kitchen of, and it’s filled in, and I still couldn’t tell you.

My grandmother’s recipes went to my dad. My uncle took them out of my dad’s storage unit.

So the cards on this wall belong to nobody I’m related to. I think that is part of why I like it. Somebody wrote out a waffles recipe by hand and it survived long enough to end up in my pantry, and I would rather have it on a wall than in a box on a floor.

How it went together

There is nothing to this. That’s the point of it.

The backing is cardboard. I cut a piece to fit the opening in the frame. It doesn’t need to be anything better than that, because nothing hanging on it is heavy.

The doilies and clippings are Mod Podged down. I layered them. Cookbook pages first, then the clippings, then the doilies over the top so the paper shows through the openwork. I let them run past the edges and off the sides rather than trying to center anything.

The recipe cards are held on with fancy pushpins. Just ones I had laying around. They go straight through the card and into the cardboard, and they look a lot better than the plain ones.

Save

That’s it. Old frame, cardboard, glue, pushpins, and things I already owned.

The aprons finish it

Under the frame is a peg rack, and on the pegs are my aprons.

One of them is the reason the whole wall works. It’s made from old jeans and an old quilt, sewn together. Denim on the bib and quilt blocks down the body, with the seams left showing.

An upcycled apron under an upcycled frame, in a pantry that is mostly upcycled anyway. That room is where I keep my jars and my day-to-day cooking things, and it is still a work in progress.

But this wall is done, and I am proud of it.

If you have a wall that nothing fits on, go look in the places in your house where things get put and forgotten. The attic. The barn. The bottom of the closet.

Mine had a cardinal in it.