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Grandmother Tips

Alessandra Baldereschi’s collection of wooden tools and cardboard recipes Grandmother Tips recovers old traditions, transforming them into useful products for household cleaning.

In the past centuries herbs had been used not just for cooking, but also for housecleaning.

Aromatic herbs are easy to grow in gardens or pots and they are efficacious in performing different functions on household cleaning as degreasing, disinfect and deodorize.

For instance, rosemary and marjoram have been used directly on the floors to be tramped on, so that their perfume and fragrance spread in the air. Lavender is a powerful natural antiseptic and in 1700 was used to clean floors. Laurel properties works against mold and can be used on different surfaces while cinnamon is a powerful disinfectant suitable for the bathroom, etc...

Alessandra Baldereschi’s collection Grandmother Tips recovers some old traditions, transforming them into useful products for household cleaning. The project consists of two collections: a collection of wooden tools and a collection of cardboard recipes.

The wooden utensils such as brushes, brooms of various sizes, hangers and room scents, are designed to receive the fresh herbs and exploit their properties for household cleaning.

They are eight tools, each of which is constituted by two wooden parts with applied a high-performance rubber, suitable to contain and preserve organic elements. The rubber used is a material with open cells, obtained from caucciù (natural rubber). It has excellent flexibility and mechanical strength. Ideal for absorbing liquids.

Each instrument is able to accommodate any type of grass or natural bristle because it is easy to assemble: it opens and closes with two rubber bands on the ends of each instrument.

The collection of recipes, instead, is in shaped cardboard and includes 17 objects of different shape and size. Each object in cardboard, shaped to identify the function they are to perform, contains aromatic herbs and/or spices dried with its recipe to achieve a remedy for cleaning in the home.