Around the same time, I received a catalog in the mail from one of my favorite paper stores. The colors and the quality of the paper, as well as the square shape of the catalog, inspired me and I started altering it with a pile of new stamps I had recently acquired. I pieced together my altered book-cookbook idea with the fact that I was altering a mail order catalog. And thus, this month’s project was born!
Essentially, I had a basic plan to break the book up into a preface of sorts, with a guest book page and a menu, and then appetizers, main meal and desserts. Once I sorted that out, I looked at the catalog to see how well the photos and quotes on the pages meshed with my content. I then began adding sticky notes to the pages so I’d remember what I had planned out.
My next step was to gesso the pages. I was careful to gesso only the parts of the pages that I didn’t want to see or that I would be covering up with images and words. When all of the gessoed pages were dried and ready to go, I started covering pages with paint and paper.
On the first two spreads, “Welcome” and “Menu,” I sponged paint over the gesso and overlapped the photos a little. Both pages use two complementary paint colors, dark behind the lighter shade, to create texture. When the paint was dry, I used alphabet stickers and glitter to complete them.
The appetizer page is painted stripes with handwritten recipes. The butterflies aren’t exactly a Thanksgivingly sort of image, but I decided to go with the colors and images that were in the photo on that catalog page.
For the turkey recipe page, I photocopied a photo of my first turkey from an old scrapbook and pasted in a (clean) printout of my tried and true favorite recipe. The catalog pages were first covered with cardstock that was run through a Xyron machine.
There are two pages of side recipes in this book, because one can never have too many traditional Thanksgiving side dishes! On the first page, which was simply painted with bright yellow, I hand wrote a few recipes and decorated the pages with stamped and confetti leaves. There were some flowers in the photo on the page, so I added in a few flowers, with pearl brads securing them. Remember that if you use brads to attach items to your pages, plan ahead so that you have another page to glue to the back of that page. It will cover the brad prongs!
My favorite page in this book is the second side dish page. All of the cardstock used in this book is from the Waned collection from Cosmo Cricket. I utilized some of the die cuts with the pearl brads on this page and I think they are such fun! I also amused myself by framing a small photo of the infamous Green Bean Casserole. Really, this dish belongs in a museum!
The Pie Page is similar to the Welcome and Menu pages, except I used four colors for the sponging to get a “big pile of raked leaves” feeling. Over that, I collaged pie clippings from magazines and did a little bit of journaling.
The cover was fun to do. Like in another article in this series, I painted the cover with a thick layer of gesso and stamped a leaf stamp into it. After it dried, I rubbed chalk inks and metallic rub-ons all over the cover, blending the colors with my fingers. After sealing with acrylic spray, it’s ready for further embellishments, a title or leaving it just as it is.
After all of the pages were complete, I used page tab die cuts to create sections in the cookbook.
Don’t try to work on this book one page at a time! Ideas don’t always come when you want them to, so feel free to jump around and have more than one page in progress at a time. Working on the book as a whole allows you to change your plan midstream if something isn’t working for you. The only frustration you should have over this book is your impatience with the paint drying time and even that can be cured by waving around your heat tool!
