Vintage Menu Clipboard

What's for supper, mama? How many times do you think we'll hear this in our lifetime? A million more, I hope! Another one of my favorite hobbies is cooking and menu planning. I know, a lot of you are thinking *ick, I hate to cook*. But I love it! My mother and grandmothers were cooks and gardeners and we were always picking, stemming, canning and cooking everything in sight. It was a great time for me back in those days. Today, I still love to do all those things and have been passing along my secrets to my two girls who love to cook as well.

So this morning I whipped up this vintage style clipboard to house my recipes and weekly menus. Now sometimes that weekly menu consists of Hot Pockets and Lunchables so don't go thinking I'm Martha Stewart! I'm more like Sandra Lee of Semi-Homemade Cooking! She's on the Food Network Channel.

Anyway, I digress often so bear with me. This clipboard is embellished with my favorite new paper from Cosmo Cricket, which you can purchase at Eclectic Paperie(link at right). I rounded the corners mod podged it to the clipboard. The wonderful vintage stamped embellishments are from a set called Kitchen Classics from Crafty Secrets(Sweet Miss Daisy sells these now). I am in love with their new line of vintage images. The bird set is next on my list! To tone down the shiny silver metal of the clipboard, I dabbed on some tan colored alcohol ink. My friend Cindy will be so proud, she is the queen of alcohol inks! The ric rac is new from my LSS and the vintage loopy ribbon came from a box of junk that my local Senior Center donated to me, what a find! Well, I'm off to go put some recipes in my clipboard. I hope you enjoy it, and go cook something with your kids today!

Tip of the day: Do you have difficulty in shading while watercoloring images? Let your stamped images guide you. Look for those little shaded lines, like in the utensils on my clipboard. Those are shadow lines. Color those areas darker. The areas that are left white are highlighted areas. Make those areas a lighter color. Leaving an area white in those areas is also very pleasing to the eye.