Have you ever seen a recipe scrapbook? I never had until recently. After I did though, I made it a high priority on the "To Scrap..." list. What could be more cherished by future generations than a book full of family recipes and some of the stories behind them? If you decide to do a recipe scrapbook of your own, there are some things you will want to consider before beginning. First, will you actually use this as a cookbook? Or is this going to be for memorabilia only and stored with the rest of your scrapbooks? Knowing the answer to this question might help you decide on what kind of pages you will do. For example, if you will be using the album to cook, you may not want to get too detailed or have too many lumpy embellishments on your pages because the book will be in "high use." If you will be pulling the pages in and out of the protectors a lot, simple pages would work best. Some good examples of some simple recipe pages are shown here, done by Editorial Designer Melissa Zeno.



The second thing to consider is what size pages will you want to do? If you plan on actually using the scrapbook for cooking the recipes, then you might want to consider doing an 8 ½ X 11 album. They are easier to handle than 12 X 12 albums and that is important when you are working around food and liquids. Make sure whatever size you choose, you use page protectors to prevent your pages from getting ruined by kitchen mistakes. For my recipe book, I chose to do the smaller album as opposed to my usual 12 X 12. It is harder to get a lot on to a smaller page when you are use to working with a larger canvas, so you will have to weigh what is more important to you... easier handling, or more space on a page for more stuff!

The final thing to consider, is how detailed you want your pages. There are some great things out there to embellish pages - even recipe pages! Jolee's By You from EK Success has around 700 new designs of which include many food items. I found these irresistible when planning this project. Below are some examples of the pages I did with the Jolee's By You line.

For the next two layouts I did, I went a bit fancier. I did so because these are special recipes to me since both were passed down from each Grandmother. On the layout titled "Grandma Mucha's Potato Soup With Ribleys," I went with more of a heritage look because of the great black and white picture I used of my Grandma as a young woman. I also went a bit fancier here in this layout, "Oma's Sauerkraut." For this layout I used a great new tool called the Versa-Tool. It is a tool that does wood burning, soldering, shading, transferring, stencil cutting and more! It is awesome! I used it to burn the designs in the envelope and recipe card, shade the envelope and all the edges of my papers. This tool is a must have!

This was such a fun album! I will continue to add to it for years to come. I hope it has inspired you to do one of your own!