Heritage Décor: Display Family Recipes as Wall Art

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Family history wall art. — A professional designer turns her grandmother’s handwritten recipes into wall art—and the focal point of her dining room.

Jessica Stacey George is a professional designer who creates her own sewing patterns. After her grandmother passed away, she inherited digitized files of all her grandmother’s handwritten recipes. She also scanned her own copies of her other grandmother’s recipes. Creating beautiful things is her forte, so George looked for a way to display the heirloom handwriting.

“I saw an article floating around on Pinterest where someone scanned recipes and printed them on dish towels,” she says. “I thought it was so cute! It was a tutorial for Spoonflower fabric, where you can print your own fabric designs.”

“I didn’t want to do a dishtowel because it would get dirty,” she continues. “So I designed my own fabric and wrapped it around a pre-stretched canvas.” George wanted to use vertical canvas panels, which limited the recipe images she could use, since most of them were horizontal. She found one vertically-oriented recipe from her grandma Stacey for cream cheese pie, shown in the center panel, and two from her grandma Christensen.

She gets the most comments from the recipe printed on a Zantac promotional pad. “My grandma was a nurse and was always writing on the prescription pads,” she explains. “I didn’t even think twice about it—that was so grandma! But I had to look up what Zantac was used for and make sure it was ok to put on the wall. (It’s for heartburn).”

The Zantac pad recipe also has another fun history element in it. “That homemade ice cream recipe was made when Tang just came out. It sounds really good—until you get to the Tang part. So I’ve never actually made it.”

Here’s a video tutorial from Spoonflower fabric showing how to reproduce handwritten recipes on tea towels. This is what inspired George to print the recipes on fabric:

Here’s another option for putting your heirloom recipes on hand towels, using fabric transfer sheets instead of custom-printed fabric:

George says it was worth the effort to create these unique panels. “We get so many compliments on them!” She also finds it sweet to have reminders of both her grandmothers on her dining room wall. Thanks to Jessica Stacey George, owner of Sweetbriar Sisters sewing patterns, for sharing this great idea with us!

Looking for more great heritage décor or family history-themed crafting ideas? Follow us on Pinterest! Check out our boards on Family History Crafts and Gifts and Heirloom Preservation.