DIY Recipe Book

I promised a crafty tutorial and I’m delivering today. I wanted to make my brother a recipe book for his birthday, filled with old family recipes (thanks, Mom!) and some new ones (many of which you’ve seen on this blog. All recipes that have been taste-tested for yummyness.

I scoured the internets for a way to do this recipe book, and there wasn’t much. I found Tastebook, and while those look really good, they are pricey and I wanted more of a DIY approach. I didn’t want a recipe box – I don’t like them as they get messy real quick. I thought about hitting Staples for a binder but hit Hobby Lobby’s scrapbooking section first. So glad I did. I’m not a scrapbooker but was able to adapt those supplies to come up with this recipe book. And here’s how.

First things first, I decided how big my pages would be (based on the cover I bought). I did the typing. formatting, and photo insertion in PowerPoint. You could probably do this in Word too. In PowerPoint, a finished page looked like this:

RecipeBookSamplePage

I then carefully cut out the pages, and was careful about where to hole-punch. Precision is key.

I also made some header pages. Scrapbook stickers add a lot of fun, though there’s a treasure trove of clipart images available too.

The cover was purchased from Hobby Lobby too. It was too thick for the hole-puncher, so BHE drilled and sanded where I marked. I then used binder rings to bind it all together.

I really like the look. It was a lot of work, but made for a nice, personal, DIY gift.

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