Cookbook competitions have been gaining popularity on the Internet lately. But even if you are not a fan of such competitions, your DIY scrapbook cookbook will still take first place in your kitchen.
A cookbook in which you can write down your favorite recipe, for example, or paste a clipping from a magazine, is an indispensable companion of a good housewife. With a little effort, you can make it a real decoration of the kitchen, and not just a useful accessory. The proposed version of the Provence-style cookbook is good because you can endlessly supplement it with more and more new pages, as long as your imagination and recipes are enough.
DIY cookbook: a master class for beginners
For work you will need:
- cardboard or paper for scrapbooking;
- PVA glue;
- brush for glue;
- fastening from the folder;
- napkins with a beautiful pattern for decoupage;
- decoupage cards;
- hole puncher;
- a notebook on a spring;
- disposable spoon;
- glue gun;
- green spray paint;
- decorative elements - braid, buttons, chains, cords. 
Work sequence:
1. Cut out a cookbook holder from a binder. It is better to use a mount on rings - during operation it will be convenient to flip through the sheets and add new ones. 
2. Prepare a cardboard base for a book cover and a page measuring 20x28 cm. The size can be arbitrary, depending on the cardboard that will be purchased. For an album in the Provence style, it is better to use uncoated, with grayish sheets, since such a surface absorbs glue very well, fingerprints do not remain on it, and it already has a texture in itself. For the cover, you can take the usual packaging cardboard, as in the sample. It is much thicker and very suitable for the cover.
3. Come up with a sketch of the cover. You can draw it, or you can simply combine the pictures and napkins that are available. 
4.Finish the right edge of the cover with a border. The Provence style is characterized by plaid and striped patterns in muted colors, so checkered napkins combined with cotton braid were used for the sample. Glue napkins and braid on PVA, and apply glue only to the base, and then apply decorative elements. 
5. Cut out the silhouette of the apron and a pocket for it from thick packing cardboard. They will become voluminous elements of the cover. 
6. Separate from the napkin, which will be the pattern of the apron, the top layer with the pattern. Spray it with a spray bottle and smooth it with a warm iron.
7. With a wide brush, cover the blanks of the apron and pocket with PVA glue, stick a napkin, smooth out bubbles and wrinkles with a wide soft brush. 
8. Find a place for the apron on the cover, circle with a pencil. Glue the apron ribbons to the marked places with a glue gun. Fix long ties in several places with drops of glue. Glue the apron and pocket. 
9. Add decorative elements. It is better to fasten the buttons with a glue gun, but you can also sew them to cardboard sheets - in this case, the threads on the reverse side should pass through the second button. 
10. Cover a plastic spoon with spray paint first on one side, after drying on the other. 
12. For writing down recipes in a home cookbook, it is convenient to use sheets from a lined notebook. In order to remove them without tearing them off, it is necessary to remove the spring by slightly opening it with scissors. 
13. Proceed with the design of the inner pages of the book. For each, select suitable pictures and napkins.
14. When using decoupage cards, you must first cut out the element, then immerse it in warm water for 1 minute, blot it and then stick it on the surface. Images from decoupage cards are opaque, and therefore brighter than those of napkins. 
15. Check the combination of adjacent pages on the spread, because the sheets in the book will be double-sided. Add decorative elements. 
16. Measure the middle along the left edge of the cover and sheets. Punch holes for mounting with a hole punch. Insert pages, number as desired.
Here is such a beautiful do-it-yourself cookbook in the Provence style you will succeed. Really great?
Gribanova Irina (Iriana)
What else can you give to culinary girls? May be
Cooking has long been considered a kind of magic. Food can heal, give mood, even return the love of life. Just as every wizard needs his own grimoire, so a cook needs a good book to enter his secrets and secrets of cooking, or to enter recipes borrowed from other masters of cooking. Therefore, a do-it-yourself cookbook is like a good dish, but which is stored for years.
Spring Recipes
The basis for such a collection will be a metal or plastic spring, on which the pages will join. For the book you will need:
- the required number of A5 sheets;
- two cardboard sheets of good density;
- four sheets of scrapbooking paper;
- several thin plastic or cardboard sheets for sections;
- spring;
- stickers with the names of dishes or clippings from magazines, unnecessary books, etc.;
- scissors, pencil, glue, hole punch.
The beginning is to design the cover of the notebook. We apply scrap paper sheets to the cardboard, wrap about 1 cm on each side and glue it.
We also seal the inside with paper so that its edges do not reach the edges of the covers by 0.5 cm.
These stickers should be cut out, laminated on one side with adhesive tape.
Dividers should be slightly longer than the pages of the notebook and its cover. They need to make protruding bookmarks, drawing in front of this pencil. Each edge of the separator is marked with a protrusion line with a pencil, after which, depending on their number, the extreme strip is divided by marks for this same number, equal to each other in length. The final step will be cutting off the unnecessary strip to the place of the tag. You should get approximately the same separators as in the photo:
Labels with inscriptions corresponding in size are glued to them.
After what has been done, you need to fold the notebook in the future sequence and proceed to work with the hole punch. The holes should line up with the coils of the spring, so the rule here is: measure seven times, cut once, in the case of a book, pierce once. In this case, it is worth practicing on a draft sheet.
You can add a gripping elastic band to the notebook by making two holes in the back cover at the top and bottom, passing an elastic band through them, fixing the tails in the inside with tape or tying them together.
Notepad will look something like this:
You can also use the following page binders:
- metal two rings for albums;
- laces, rope or ties, threaded into the holes of the sheets;
- clerical stitching of sheets - 4-5 holes, which, after stitching with a thread, are covered with a fold of the first sheet of the book;
- folder.
The cover can be made soft by sticking it on cardboard and wrapping polypropylene film with scrap paper or cloth. Instead of ties, you can use a button-button, a magnetic button, or a regular button with a satin or crocheted eyelet.
Volumetric option
If the notebook type does not suit the cook, he should get acquainted with the master class on making a real book. This will require:
- sheets in the required quantity, A4 format;
- cover from an unnecessary book, notebook, album, etc.;
- scrap paper for wrapping the cover;
- kraft paper;
- figured hole punch;
- scissors, stationery knife, strong thread with a needle;
- two stationery clips, glue, pencil;
- decoration elements;
- instant coffee;
- ink;
- tape and 4 eyelets.
Coffee is necessary for coloring sheets of paper, giving them the effect of old age. To do this, a warm solution with coffee is poured into a baking sheet, where sheets of paper are placed in turn until they are completely wet, after which the paper is hung out to dry. After drying, the sheets are leveled with an iron. We evenly bend each sheet in half, make out the edges with a hole punch, making them openwork.
The paper should be folded into an even stack, the top and bottom of the workpiece should be pressed with clerical clips, placing squares of paper under them so as not to spoil the sheets.
On the spine of the workpiece, we make along 6 marks with a pencil, along which shallow notches are made with a clerical knife.
To sew the sheets, you need to take two strips of fabric, place them in the marked areas so that two areas from the edges and the middle one are free.
We thread the thread through the notches of each sheet so that it runs along the top of the areas with fabric stripes. All sheets are stitched in the described way into one tight binding, the end of which is made out by a good strong knot. Having again placed the clamps on the workpiece, we smear the spine with transparent glue, put it under the press, for example, from several heavy books. Drying should take several hours.
We wrap the cover with kraft paper, bending the edges 4 cm into the inside, carefully cutting and gluing the paper.
For the outer decor of the cover, we cut out two fragments from scrap paper half a centimeter less than one turn of the cover. Fragments can be sheathed with a line on a typewriter or manually. We add decorative elements according to our imagination or using pre-prepared ideas.
To tie the book, you need to make holes in the middle of the front and back covers, which we cover with eyelets. We stretch ribbons through the holes, the edges of which are fixed on the inside of the covers with glue and tape.
To combine the cover with the glued sheets, we apply a square of paper to the glue, which, smeared with glue and on the other hand, is put into the cover.
We make endpapers for a book from ordinary sheets of paper, in size they should be half a centimeter smaller than the edges of the cover. We paste them at the beginning of the book and at the very end.
The title of the book can be printed on a printer or applied by yourself with ink.
Video on the topic of the article
Video on creating a cookbook with your own hands:
Today the site "Mom can do anything!" offers several ideas on how to make a cookbook beautiful and convenient for you. Every woman has to cook. And all of us, whether we like to spend time in the kitchen or not, are trying to find new interesting recipes. Someone is looking for simple quick cooking ideas, and someone is constantly in search and creation of culinary masterpieces. We download recipes from the Internet, save them on the pages of our social networks, write them down on pieces of paper, on our phones. And in this sea of information, they quickly get lost, and for half an hour now we have been looking for where did we write down the recipe for that wonderful pie?
There are two ways to store recipes:
- electronic;
- paper version.
Electronic cookbooks
Paper Cookbook Ideas
Cooking recipes in paper form can be stored in the following ways:
- Notebook on rings. Such a simple and convenient way to store notes has replaced the usual common notebooks. Each sheet can be pulled out individually or a new one can be added. Also, these notebooks usually include separators for the categories “Soups”, “Garnishes”, “Pastries”, etc. Sheets of such a notebook can be enclosed in separate files, so there is no danger that they will accidentally get dirty or torn.
- Albums for photos. Albums are very convenient for storing records. Each recipe is put into a separate cell and, if desired, can be taken out.
- Business card holder. This storage option is very compact, each recipe is in its own cell. This option is convenient if you are compiling a menu.
- Recipe folder. In that case, there is no need to rewrite recipes from magazines - the folder will be very convenient. Make dividers and categorize recipes.
- Catalog. Each recipe must be written on a separate card. For durability, the cardboard can be laminated, and for convenience, stick a magnetic tape on the back. Having such a catalog is very convenient to make a menu and hang it on the refrigerator door. Another plus is that it is much easier to find the desired recipe in the catalog box and get it (it is much more difficult to extract the leaflet from the album).
Sometimes it seems that making a cookbook is very difficult. If you don't have time to sort out the recipes and put them in order, use the Flylady's basic principle - move in small steps. Even if you write down one recipe a day in a cookbook, by the end of the year there will already be 365 of them! How do you store recipes?
The main goal of organizing recipes and cookbooks is to be able to easily find the desired recipe, because recipes are created to facilitate cooking, and not vice versa.
Think about where and how your recipes are now stored: on a computer, ipad, tablet, phone. Do you have paper cookbooks, do you collect magazine clippings? Perhaps you use the Internet to store links to interesting recipes.
Organization of recipes
It is likely that you do not have a problem with the organization of recipes. It all depends on how many cookbooks you have. Perhaps you already have a certain system of their own organization.
In any case, I recommend adding an item about trashing recipes to your calendar, because even if all your recipes are a few cookbooks inherited from your mother or grandmother, it is likely that even their storage is worth organizing.
In most cases, recipe storage is an ongoing process. Sooner or later, we find on the Internet or in a magazine an interesting dish that we would like to try to cook.
You may even want to arrange the recipes as cute cards or put them in an organizer, you can even print your own recipe book (if desired). But of course the main goal of the organization is to create a functional and working system.
Step #1: Consider all the ways you can store your recipes, catalog them
The best way to improve the system and create the ability to quickly find the right recipe is to catalog them. Remember, our task is to save time spent on menu preparation and cooking.
Even if you are the most practical person in the world, I do not believe that you have ever had the desire to try cooking something new. So if you like to experiment, want to improve your cooking skills, you will find recipes that you have put off for later. The main problem will be to distinguish those that you will actually try from fantasy recipes that will most likely never be used.
But whoever you are, you need to create your own organized recipe storage system that will be truly convenient for you.
The very first step in solving the problem of compiling a menu is, after all, compiling a list of dishes that your family loves. These are the so-called basic dishes.
Whatever recipes you add, the main list will remain practically unchanged, because you will add to it really what you are used to, what has become a tradition and has long been loved by you and your loved ones.
Let's divide all the recipes into 4 categories:
- practical: basic menu recipes used on a regular basis;
- ambitious: recipes that you want to try cooking in the future;
- sentimental: old, family recipes from your grandmother's or mother's cookbook;
- holiday: recipes for the occasion (for family celebrations, birthdays, New Year's holidays).
Step #2: Organize Your Recipes and Cookbooks in Each of These Categories
In the second step of solving the organizational problem of storing recipes and cookbooks, get rid of everything superfluous. Throw away or donate those cookbooks that you will definitely never use in your life. Decide where to store each category of recipes.
This category will include recipes and cookbooks that you use on a regular basis. Obviously, these recipes require the least amount of littering. It is advisable to store them right in the kitchen for easy access when needed.
Make a list of your family's favorite dishes right away, it will help you in the future when planning your menu and at the same time it will become a table of contents for your tried and tested recipes.
Use the following template:
These are old cookbooks, respected family recipes written in your grandmother's handwriting. These recipes have no place in your kitchen. They are generally not for practical use. Such books should be kept away from the kitchen, because this is history. In fact, kitchens for such books are simply not safe. It is hot and humid, and things in the kitchen can be splashed with grease or simply doused with something. Therefore, the kitchen is not a place for paper heirlooms.
Take the time to put these recipes or clippings in a family scrapbook so that these memories are kept in the right place in your home.
If you still use one or more of these recipes, it is better to make a photocopy of these pages. This way you won't have to worry about the precious family heirloom being damaged or damaging the original.
This is exactly the category of recipes that needs hard littering. First you have to decide if the recipe is really worth putting in your recipe book. Do you really want to try it in the future.
If this recipe has been with you for several years and you have not tried it, this is a serious reason to think about whether you really need it.
The ambitious category is very useful. It is she who gives you inspiration when compiling the menu, gives you the opportunity to diversify and enrich it. However, there should not be too many such recipes, otherwise you simply won’t have enough life to try them, and your shelves will be filled with useless garbage.
If you still want to try one of these fantasy recipes in the future, it's better to find it on the Internet. When the time comes, you can find it again and try it.
Holiday Recipes: these are not recipes for everyday use (traditional holiday dishes or just ideas for decorating them beautifully).
Recipes "on the occasion" are best stored in a separate folder and taken out when preparing for any holiday (birthdays, new year, etc.)
Leave in the kitchen only those recipes that can fit there and that you use constantly. By compiling the menu and, if you wish, to diversify it, you can get a folder with new recipes that you would like to try. You can even make a separate list of them and cook, for example, one such recipe once every one or two weeks. In addition to the fact that your menu will become diverse, you will be able to improve your culinary skills, and you will not be gnawed by that terrible feeling when you have a whole stack of recipes that attract you, but you allegedly never get your hands on them.
Step #3. Create a system for storing and organizing recipes that you would like to try in the future.
So, the third step in organizing cookbooks and recipes is to create an organization system for your yet-to-be-tested recipes, the ones we littered in step #2.
Until the recipes have been tried, you do not know if you will like them or not. Therefore, the system of their organization should be quite simple. Why stick recipes in a magazine that will probably be thrown away later. It is better if the place of their storage makes it easy to move or remove recipes that you do not like.
Try the 2 easiest solutions to organize this kind of recipes:
- folders with ties, buttons or locks;
- folder with files.
Now break the recipes into categories. Do not create more than 5-7 categories.
When you find a recipe you'd like to try in a magazine or on the advice of a friend, simply put it in the appropriate folder. Then, when you're tempted to try some new breakfast recipe, you just pull out that folder and check it out. If you like the resulting dish, you can transfer these recipes to a folder with already proven recipes. But don't rush before doing this - try this recipe a few more times. Only then can you finally decide whether it suits you or not.
Do not use folders that are too thick for untested recipes. Be realistic, otherwise there is a chance that your untested recipes will simply spin out of control. Now there is the Internet, so it is not necessary to store them all.
That's why, get into the habit of date-printing new recipes when you put them in your folder for recipes not yet tested. Make a rule for yourself that if you don't try this recipe within X amount of time (one week, one month, one year, etc.) that you will throw it away and not feel guilty about it.
In addition, if you already have a lot of recipes that you would like to try, you should practically start doing it. Make this a priority. Try one recipe once a week, for example, to diversify your menu. Add one of these recipes to your Weekly Menu Plan. Such a habit will unload the storage of unverified recipes in a matter of weeks without any problems on your part and remorse.
Step #4: Decide where to store and create an organization system for all of your trusted and family favorite recipes
The bulk of the time we will spend on organizing time-tested recipes. These are the most important recipes, as they are the ones you use most often.
Once you're really sure you really like a particular recipe, take the time to move it from your untested recipes folder to a folder (or other storage location - we'll discuss different recipe storage systems below) with frequently used recipes. Try to do this regularly.
Make your choice as to which recipe organization system is most appropriate for you based on your personality and system goals. Remember that the main purpose of a recipe organization system is to provide easy access to recipes.
But whichever recipe storage system you use, it's best to start by breaking your recipes into categories or even sub-categories.
Here are a few categories of recipes, use them "as is" or just as an idea to create your own categories:
- breakfasts;
- Dinners;
- Snacks;
- Soups;
- Salads;
- Main dishes: Beef;
- Main dishes: Pork;
- Main dishes: Poultry;
- Main dishes: Other types of meat and offal;
- Main dishes: Seafood;
- Main dishes: Vegetarian dishes (if you are a fan of it);
- Side dishes: Vegetables;
- Side dishes: Other;
- Dessert;
- Canned and frozen meals;
- Bakery;
- Beverages.
Organizing Cookbooks
Not all cookbooks deserve to be in your kitchen. Leave only those that you really often (at least once a week) use.
As we discussed above, the kitchen is not the best place to store books. So if you love cookbooks, really use them regularly for cooking, look around your kitchen and think of a practical place to store them. This place, in addition to easy access, should protect your books from moisture and grease. If you don't find such a place, maybe you should still put these books somewhere else? For example, perhaps you have bookshelves right next to the kitchen.
Basic organizational solutions for recipe storage
Which way to store recipes to choose: whether to store recipes in paper or electronic form?
The first thing you should think about when solving this issue is whether you need to have paper-based recipes at all? If it is more convenient for you to use the electronic form and you are already used to it, maybe you should not organize paper recipes at all, but simply convert them to electronic form?
Of course, having less paper is a huge plus, but scanning and translating all your prescriptions electronically can be very tedious. In addition, you will need to have constant access to your computer or tablet while cooking. So think about whether it will be practical for you?
If you're concerned about getting dirty or spilling liquids on electronic devices, paper may still be the best choice for you.
But paper can also get dirty. Therefore, those recipes that you use most often, you can use them, for example:
- laminate;
- cover with transparent self-adhesive paper (film).
Transparent adhesive paper, which is most often used for pasting textbook covers, can be bought in a roll in the most ordinary industrial store. For example, in St. Petersburg, such a roll of transparent self-adhesive paper can be bought at Maksidom. The same paper can be easily found in office supply stores.
The transparent film will protect your recipes from spilling liquid on them and keep them for a long time.
Technology for storing recipes in electronic form: software and the Internet
If you want to organize recipes electronically, there are computer programs, and applications for ipad, android, and even sites on the Internet, for example (Electronic Cookbook Online), which allow you to both use the recipes available on the site and add your own.
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Using the internet to store recipes
They are always at hand and available. The only negative is that they are just links to recipes from other sites, and sites are not always eternal, so the link will remain, but the recipe itself on someone's site may disappear forever.
Therefore, it is quite likely that it is possible or even better to use some kind of online service for storing recipes and compiling menus, for example, this one.
If you still decide to stick with the paper version of recipes, then folders with files are, in my opinion, one of the most common and successful ways to organize recipes.
You can use multiple folders or use separators to categorize recipes.
One of the oldest ways to organize recipes is to use small cards that you can write recipes on by hand and then simply place in a box or folder, divided into categories, also using separators.
Dividers can be made from scrap paper, and a drawer can be used for storage. It all depends on your imagination.
Successful organization!
The production of decorated albums and books is gaining more and more popularity. Such products are original receptacles of various kinds of information and are filled with compositions of photographs, pictures, inscriptions, quotes, newspaper clippings, and so on. For those who are fond of cooking and keep in mind a lot of recipes, a cookbook will be very useful.
For many centuries, people have been making albums to store notes, drawings, letters, poems and rare photographs, which were greatly valued and protected. Gradually, a separate type of needlework was formed - scrapbooking, which in literal translation from English means "a book of clippings." Now this technique is used by craftsmen to create not only books, but also envelopes, caskets, postcards, gift boxes and everything that requires an unusual design.
What you need for a DIY cookbook
As a practice, you can make a book from purchased sets with different topics. Anyone who wants to start working on their own can find the necessary materials to their taste in the departments with goods for creativity. The following decorative elements are useful for a cookbook: cardboard for binding and ordinary colored paper, thick paper with patterns and drawings (pieces of wallpaper are suitable as a background), themed stickers and pictures, photos of ready meals, letter stencils, stamps with different patterns, lace and satin ribbons, laces, beads, large buttons, rhinestones, metal jewelry. For decor, you can use any improvised materials, adjusting this list.
In addition, a whole set of tools is needed: glue (PVA, instant, aerosol), double-sided tape, simple and curly scissors, a hole punch (regular and border), a stationery knife, clips, a pencil and a ruler.
DIY cookbook: master class
You should start making a book with recipes from the cover, which can be different. A simple cardboard cover can be made soft using synthetic winterizer and canvas, while the front side is complemented by windows for various inserts. This is done using two layers of fabric superimposed on each other. After wrapping the cardboard, punch holes at a distance of 2 cm from the edge, insert the eyelets and thread the rings. This is the simplest, but quite beautiful option.
A book in the form of a reference book with a solid cardboard cover requires preliminary preparation: you need to print A4 pages with ready-made lines for writing, pictures and patterns, which can later be decorated with three-dimensional elements. Sheets are interleaved with colored dividers, stitched (by hand or on a typewriter) and connected to the cover using endpapers.
You can make a cover from two sheets of MDF 3 mm thick. This is more painstaking work, so before starting it is better to watch or read the master class. Fine sandpaper, a drill and paper clip rings are added to the list of materials listed earlier. The drill must be selected with a slightly larger diameter than the rings, and it is better to drill sheets on a wooden board. The resulting holes must be sanded on both sides, after which you can start decorating with a cloth. Holes for fasteners are cut into the fabric with a thin knife or awl. This cookbook cover will last longer.
The scope for imagination increases when it comes to page design. You can find a lot of interesting ideas, for example, using glued (sewn) pockets to store special notes, or painting over paper in some places with an ink pad and ink.
Do not forget about the convenience when flipping through the book: it can be divided into sections in accordance with the order of dishes (first, second, desserts, snacks, drinks, etc.) or according to another criterion. The openwork edges of the pages look great. You can achieve this effect if you use a special hole punch or scissors, and in their absence, you can use a stencil.
original bookmarks
Bookmarks are not only an original decoration, but also a useful thing that makes it easier to work with recipes. In order for the bookmark to be with the book in the same style and color scheme, the leftover materials will come in handy. Having picked up a template, you should cut out the base from cardboard and arrange it with scrapbook paper, lace ribbons and other flat elements. With the help of a lace, the bookmark is glued to the cover.
A soft bookmark made of two layers of fabric sewn together with folded edges looks different. You can attach a brush of thread or a figure cut out of felt to it, embroider a pattern. Also, the bookmark can be crocheted and supplemented with beads or other decorations.
A self-assembled cookbook will become a source of inspiration even for a novice cook, serve as an unforgettable gift and decorate any kitchen.
Video on the topic of the article