Recipe Tag Books: A Tutorial!

One of my favorite things to make for gifts is a recipe tag book.

You can include family recipes in categories or in a single category (like desserts). Or, you can use the same idea to make a booklet with household hints, drinks, family memories, favorite quotes, baby tips, or other good wishes.

I am lucky to have a good group of friends who gathers together for dinner periodically. For this week's gathering I said I'd bring the party favors!


Everyone was asked to submit a recipe and then I put together little booklets.

Here's how:

Supplies: largest-sized shipping tags (office supply)
papers
inks
glue stick
Golden regular gel (or strong glue)
ephemera (try images from The Vintage Workshop! They're great!)
embellishments
binder rings
ribbon or yarn
beads (optional)
Optional: Cuttlebug desktop embosser

Working with the Recipes

1. Collect recipes (shorter recipes work best).
2. Type recipes in 3-column, 8 pt. (you may need to modify, based on font; 8 pt. works for arial)
3. Print copies.
4. Separate recipes (I often tear, but doing this decided I like deckle-edge scissors just as well)


Prep tags (one tag per recipe, plus cover and dividers, if needed)

1. (Optional step) -- Use Cuttlebug to emboss (for a great post by Beth L. on this, click here.)

2. Color tag -- in this example, I brushed a pad across the embossing.

For the covers, I did ink-to-paper technique.

Glue and Creativity Time!

1. Attach recipes to all cards with glue stick.


2. Decorate divider tags and color using ephemera, papers, stickers, embellishments. For heavier pieces, use Golden gel or a stronger glue.


This is my master book, which has about 36 recipes.

In these examples, from my master book, I used a combination of techniques -- here's the cover, with ephemera and papers and a few stickers.
Here are a couple of the dividers.

For the party books, I wanted them to look similar but not identical.

I tied together the look with kitchen images from The Vintage Workshop (I love these folks!) and a kitchen-like scrapbook paper. For these, I did covers only.

Attach with binder rings and add ribbons or yarn.

These make great party favors for lots of occasions. They are time consuming, even if you get on the assembly line. Producing eight six-page (plus cover) booklets took about four hours, and that was using the Cuttlebug which was quicker than ink-to-paper for that many tags. My master book has 38 recipes, cover, and dividers for "dedication" page, dinner, salads, parties, and desserts.