I love to cook. I love to try new recipes. And the combination of those two things has blessed me with a sizable stack of computer printouts of recipes for some new favorite dishes. That was all well and good when I had a half dozen or so that I liked to make again and again, but when that pile grew to about twenty it started to get just a tad unwieldy to go through them all every time in search of the particular recipe I wanted to make.
Supplies:
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I'd already planned on making a recipe album using a Sn@p binder when Crate Paper came along with the November design team assignments, and I snapped up a spot in their "Harvest Gathering" week to give myself an extra push to get this done. Design team assignment + project I wanted to do anyway = my holy grail of scrapbooking projects!
I started out with six dividers from Simple Stories' chipboard Snap albums to use as category markers. I've got a brown leather 6x8 Snap album on order that I think will stand up well to kitchen use since the cover is easy to wipe off, but for now everything is in one of their chipboard binders. Just a little enabling- Scrapbook.com has the 6x8 leather binders on sale right now! And, since I rarely use the dividers that come with those albums, I was happy to put a few of them to use here!
The tabs are likely to get a little dirty over the years, so I decided to be proactive and paint them with several coats of Martha Stewart Chalkboard Paint. It wasn't really important to keep the paint neat, either, because my next step was to cover the dividers with some of my favorite prints from Crate Paper's Close Knit collection.
You may prefer to use Mod Podge to adhere big pieces of paper like this, but I've never had much luck wrangling that particular medium into submission, so I settled for lots and lots of ATG tape instead. And I mean lots!
The dividers are the only spots in the album where I plan on adding any embellishment. At first I had grandiose ideas of using a 6x8 Sn@p divided page for each recipe, complete with a photo, but quickly realized that a) I will not want to have to scrap a whole new layout for every recipe I add to this album and b) I'm no food photographer, so any photos I do add are likely to make the recipes look a little less appetizing.
So, decorated dividers only it was, and I chose six categories- Main Dishes, Side Dishes, Breads, Desserts, Slow Cooker, and Grill recipes. I put together a little embellishment cluster for each section, then used a white paint pen to also add the section name to the chalkboard tab.
And the recipes? Those are the easiest part of all! I wanted to make it as simple as possible to add them to the book, so the plan is to just use grid or similar designs as backgrounds and print them off on 6x8 pieces of paper, each slipped into a page protector to hopefully help protect it from food splatters. The papers below are all from various Crate Paper collections, and I'll be digging through my scraps and other papers now to look for more pages I can add.
Want to guess who's maybe a little more excited about having the recipe album finished that I am? Darren! He was also getting a little tired of shuffling through a random pile of papers to find the recipe he was looking for, and I don't want to do anything that might discourage him from cooking! ;) I think that this album is going to get a lot of use over the years, and I'm looking forward to expanding it to multiple volumes as we continue to find new favorites to add.