Scrapbook Cookbooks

A few years ago, when my brother got married, my mom got together with all the women in our family and put together a cookbook for his wife. We put each recipe on its own page in a small scrapbook, and took some time on each one to make it interesting and pretty.

Well.....it turned out so well, we all got jealous. Fortunately, Mom had the foresight to scan each page into her computer before wrapping the book up, so that next Christmas, all us girls got identical cookbooks as gifts!

They see a lot of use. Each one of us has added to them, altered them, expanded them...and when a wedding approaches, we get out the scrapbooking supplies, buy a new scrapbook, and get busy!

This fall, I decided that, as a way to keep the recipes that my family REALLY likes all in one place, a new cookbook was in order. I'm not really a scrapbook-y kind of person....but I love the paper, and making a cookbook is an excellent way for me to get to use it in a practical way!




So, I gathered my supplies.
I used an 8"x8" page book and paper stacks (which are, unfortunately, becoming extinct. I end up cutting down a lot of 12"x12" sheets.) The usual compliment of glues and adhesive squares and pens and such are necessary, and if you have fun things like fancy scissors and corner punches and the like, so much the better. I also got some Post-It brand file tabs to use as section dividers for my cookbook, which has worked VERY nicely.

For my new cookbook, I decided that I wanted every page to be handwritten, rather than printed out on the computer like we did with the first cookbook. Just a matter of personal preference - that's the fun thing about these. You can make them any which way you like. We even have a couple pages made from scanned recipe cards written out by my grandma and great grandma, which turned out VERY sharp!




Once you have a page done, you just pop it into a plastic page protector sleeve in your book. They're SO easy to rearrange that way, so if you discover that you need a new category in your book, you can just add a new tab and shuffle pages around to get it exactly how you need it. Then, when the time comes and you need a nice wedding or Christmas gift, you can just slide the pages out, scan them, and print them out on nice heavy paper to put into a new book.




Our family continues to make and exchange new pages on special occasions. Perhaps you could make this a tradition of your own!


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone