Recipe book

[BarbB]

I am thinking of making some Recipe Books for Christmas gifts. I am needing some ideas on what others use as covers? Or if you just do pages what do you use to keep the pages togeter? Do you put them in protectors of any kind? I have thought about buying albums but that can get costly and papes are limited. I am open to any ideas about covers, how do you decorate pages........ I prefer NOT doing them with MDS.(not too good with MDS) Thanks for any help from you wonderful, creative SCS's.

[gregzgurl]

I made large index cards (that fit in a file box) for my kids a few Christmases ago and they were all thrilled. If I were to do an album, I would probably go with the 5 1/2" x 8 1/2' binders and page protectors that you can get at Staples or Office Max. You can easily add or subtract pages and don't need specialty-size papers, since each page is half a sheet of standard 8 1/2" x 11" paper. A ream of cardstock would make pretty much as many pages as needed, and you could just add snippets of patterned papers or an embellishment here or there. I didn't decorate my cards at all (my kids aren't really into that - they just wanted the recipes), but you could certainly make them pretty with little effort.

[**JILL**]

I made a recipe book for my sister a few years ago. I bought a spiral bound note pad from Michaels that was in the $1 bin. It was about 5" x 7" sized. I printed and cut out the recipes and glued them to the pages. Then decorated with stamps, stickers, etc. There were lots of extra pages for her to add recipes too. Not as durable as an album with page protectors but definitely affordable. I like gregzgurl's idea of the recipe box too.

[cat_woman]

I was thinking of doing this as well this year, so these ideas will help. I was going to use a couple 6x6 scrapbooks I have, but then my mom and sister would need to hunt down the 6x6 page protectors if they wanted to add to them.