Recipe Holder - pinterest inspired

Please ignore the clutter in the background.  I'm getting ready to make dishwashing detergent, and got side-tracked.  My brain is so completely squirrelly lately that I am amazed I ever finish anything I start.

Have any of you seen this pin?

A friend of mine pinned it, and I repinned it thinking it a fabulous idea, if fabulously tacky.  It's been floating around in the back of my head for at least a few days.  I was trying to think of ways to make the hanger not look like a hanger.  I know, it's perfectly functional, but... I don't like it.  I also don't like my recipes getting icky.

I used to keep my recipes in one of those static page photo albums.  The clear laminate protects the recipe from kitchen effluvium, and they're easy to rearrange.  The only aggravation I have with those is you can't easily flip the recipe over.  I like to jot notes about alterations, substitutions, additions, and their results on the back of a recipe.  Sometimes the recipe is just too long to fit on the front of a card.  Sometimes I have two related recipes on one card (i.e. I have a recipe for two cupcakes, and on the back of the card I've got recipes for two servings of icing).  So, the static pages are a mixed blessing.  Something else I tried was just a binder with clear page protectors in it.  But that doesn't let me put more than one recipe in a pocket, unless there's nothing written on the back of either one.  Same problem.  So I like the concept of the hanger... just not the execution.

B likes to make things with wood.  He usually has scraps leftover.  I am a pack rat, and he's not always great about picking up his leftovers, so we have quite a lot of odd scraps of wood floating around in the storage room.  They also lay in the yard for a while before my inner pack rat wins out over my desire for him to clean up his own messes, so some of the bits of wood are pretty weathered.  I like weathered!

One of the scraps was only about 1 x 1.5 x 8 inches.  It seemed perfect.  A bit of twine, a sharpie, some picture hanging do-dads, and a couple clothes pins looked about like all I would need.  It turned out I used a stapler, too.  I wish my handwriting was neater.

 The picture do-dads went in the top, and I tied a couple nooses through them to string the twine.  B had a great idea to keep the recipe from flopping - attach the clothes pins to the back of the board somehow.  Well, I wanted them to be mobile, because not all my recipes are the same size/width, so we stapled the twine to the sides to create a tight line across the center back.

 Bird "helped" me tie the nooses for the string I intended to hang it by.  There's enough slack were I can easily flip the board over to read the back of the card as well.

So far it seems the best place to hang it is from the little cabinets above the stove hood.  With the cabinet door open, it hangs at eye level, and doesn't interfere with me getting stuff out for cooking, because the only things in that particular cabinet are the mosterously large insulated drink jugs B and the Pup got from 7-11 last year.

I thought about painting it, or using stencils to make the writing a bit neater.  But I decided that i would probably forget about it out drying and never finish it.  Really, my brain is that bad these days!  Besides, it fits right in with my bag drying line and my laundry sign, which are neither one very frilly, just twine, boards, and in the case of the laundry sign, a bit of paint.