Recently in print
Some things I like in the magazines lying around my house:
Giant pumpkins from Martha. Aren’t the colors beautiful?
Fried roots, in Sunset.
Heather Taylor‘s house, also in Sunset.
Flavored butters, in Bon Appetit.
Flavored madelines, in Martha.
I always get so excited when I look through them, dog-earring the pages and everything, and then rarely return to actually DO anything with the things I like.
Anyone have a good system for actually making use of all the great ideas out there? They always seem to slip away from me, or the next month’s stack arrives and I move on.
I’m exactly the same! I have piles of magazines bookmarked to high heaven. So lovely to refer back to, if you can remember where you’ve put them. :)
So far the only magazine I’ve had real luck using is Everyday Food. My girl friend told me about the magazine and I eagerly await it every month! The recipes are usually fairly simple and use ingredients I can always find at the store. I go through the current month’s issue when I’m making my grocery list for the week and pick out one or two recipes to try.
i struggle with the same dilemma — even if i do manage to tear out the pages/sections that i’m interested in, how to best organize and use them as a resource? i have managed to make a few plastic-sleeve recipe binders, but i still don’t consider it case closed. looking forward to more comments/ideas!
I put mine by my favorite cookbooks, then I just add what I want to make to my menu for the week. I do the same thing with things I bookmark from blogs.
I should say that if I love the recipe I tear it out and put it in binders that I have organized by season.
dude. so same-same.
i excitedly flag, dog ear and tear out stuff that sounds cool but then it usually just slips through my fingers from there. sigh.
i tried the binder idea… i might try to revisit it, though it never really took before so who knows if it would again.
i’ll be stalking the comments to see if anyone has a genius method!
I rip out the article immediately and leave it hanging around for a few days to see if inspiration strikes. Then I get sick of all the papers laying around, so I convert them to digital, in one of a few ways.
- If it’s a cool image, I snap a photo and save it to Pinterest (using their iPhone app – so easy).
- If it’s a recipe, I google it (they are usually posted online) and clip it to Evernote. (Which is an awesome app for organizing recipes!)
- Sometimes I scan the pages and save them to Evernote in a folder (like Projects, Travel, etc.). I keep a “to scan” folder and just shove the pages in there and scan every once in a while.
I don’t know if I actually get more projects done this way, but I can always find the ones I want later!
Oh, I do the exact same thing. And then the magazines eventually get tossed into the recycle bin and that’s that. BUT when I really, really like something, I tear it out and put it on the ‘fridge. Not exactly cutting edge, I know.
I buy those cheap-y black plastic portfolio books and keep everything that I’ve clipped that month inside, in no particular order. I think each book has about 60 or so inserts and it’s so inspiring to look back through them. I must have close to 10 of these scrap books filled mainly with recipes but also with interior and fashion inspiration.
I was a magazine hoarder and dog-earer for many, many years. I finally dove into a more minimalistic approach where I’d dog-ear, leave the magazine until I got the next one, then go back and rip out the dog ears and recycle! I have separate folders the tears go into, most being recipes or photo inspiration. I’ve found that if I don’t cook the recipes right away, I tend to forget about them. So, I usually try them once and then file!
*That doesn’t sound so minimalistic, does it? :)
I use Pinterest. Most of the magazines have their content online. I search for the article or photo I want to remember and pin it on my Pinterest inspiration board so that I can keep going back to it. If I can’t find the photo online, I’ll snap an photo of it with my iphone and upload it to Pinterest. Then all my mags go in the recycling bin.
I have three years of magazine cut outs in binders of everything I treasure in sheet protectors. I used to use them as inspiration and imagine that if I were to build a house, I could just hand over the binders and the voila – my style explained visually as if I was planning to hire a decorator?? In reality, they basically take up space in the garage and are totally useless. I still dog ear all pages with the best of intentions until the magazine stack is so high that they eventually get recycled. I simply cannot throw the binders away. Help.
Same issue here. I find that if I don’t make them right away I rarely get back to it. Lately I’ve been jotting down the recipes quickly to my iPad has helped keep them handy for me to reuse at a later date.
What issue of Martha are those Madeleines in?
i want a giant pumpkin at my house!
I dog-ear pages and then once every few weeks I’ll go back through, edit myself down to the projects I’ll really try and then file them in binders by recipes/crafts/home.
Two things I do: When I see a recipe I want to try, I clip it out and insert into a a binder of sheet protectors organized by category…breakfast, lunch, apps, drinks, salads, soups, stews, entrees, dessert. Once I actually make the recipe, if it’s a keeper, it stays. If not, out it goes to make room for another. This has turned out to be my best cookbook for sure. I have a big journal where I paste in all design photos I like. We will be building a cabin in the next year or two and this will be a way to integrate those ideas into the design. Then I recycle the mags before my stack gets out of hand. All the really good mags like Anthology and Uppercase get passed on to friends.
Those giant pumpkins are impressive.
Those madelines made me swoon … I tore the page out of Martha too!
right there with you! same mags for me too.