Making a Cookbook

[Little Italy]

I am wanting to make a few cookbooks for christmas, and i want them to look nice and have lots of pictures. Does anyone have any recommendations on how to do this without using binders?

[SixSix210]

Places like staples and office max and depot all offer a professional binding service that uses the plastic clamp/spiral bindings, they come in many different colors, and are fairly inexpensive.

Another option is to burn them to a cd, and send those.

Yet another... Go to Michaels and get an inexpensive scrapbooking kit, and use those to make an Heirloom keepsake cookbook...

Just some more of my crazy ideas...

[Little Italy]

I never thought about the staples or office depot!

I am getting recipes from three generations of my family, My grandparents, my mom and dad, and me and my brothers. Then I am going to prepare each recipe and take pictures of it and have put them in the cook book. Also, I am going to include some techniques and things like that.


I am making about five of these.

[KitchenScrapbook]

Sounds like a great idea! And a gift that they'll love! Your idea of putting pictures along with the recipes is a good one... at least my cookbooks that have pictures in them are my favorites. :)

Another idea for making the book itself is to buy some photo albums that have sleeves in them as opposed to separate photo slots (something that's not a 3-ring binder so it doesn't look as much like a photo album), then do the whole page and slip it in the sleeve. There are some nice-lookin' albums out there!

[ChadHahn]

There are self publishing firms on the internet that allow you to make and print books. Some of them are petty easy and make good looking books.

Chad

[karenlyn]

Yeah-- you can also check out cafepress.com-- they do books as well as t-shirts and things. I think it's a $5-7 to get a book made. If you don't want to make a profit, just order the number of books you want at their original purchase price and distribute. Don't even have to leave the house.

[karenlyn]

Don't quote me on the $5-7. Now that I'm thinking about it, it may be more. I'm not sure. Sorry!

[Jeekinz]

I used Staples for a couple small jobs like that a few years ago. The binding they do is pretty nice. You might want to look into having the pages laminated. To keep costs down, you can make the book out of 1/2 sheets of a standard letter size. Then you get 2 for 1.

[Michael in FtW]

Originally Posted by Little Italy

I am wanting to make a few cookbooks for christmas, and i want them to look nice and have lots of pictures. Does anyone have any recommendations on how to do this without using binders?

As others have noted - create your book, take it someplace like Kinko's, Office Depot, Staples ... they can copy and bind it using a "comb" binding.

Now, if you want a "living" family cookbook - don't discount the 3-ring binder idea too quickly. If you divide the cookbook into catagories - each year you can add new pages ... and generate a new index. This "could" be done with a comb binding - but it would be a pain to add new pages.

Just a thought ...

[jkath]

I've made cookbooks for the cookie exchanges I've held. It's actually really easy, and the recipients are so appreciative. Here's what I did:
Each recipe got 1/2 page, (if you were to take a sheet of paper, cut it in have horizontally, then turn it so the shorter side was up). I designed each recipe with a different font and cute clip arts to go with it. (I've used a lot of DJ Inkers). Each one was printed on it's own color of card stock (I prefer pastels, because they're easiest to read) and then a cover was made. The back page has an index, including the names of each person represented in the book)
Then I took the pages to the local printer and had punch a binding like a few suggested above. It is SUPER easy to put the combs into them!
It's also good if you purchase some sheets of clear plastic, and have those punched. Once they're punched, cut the tops of the punches, so that the plastic can be moved into place as a splash-guard, in front of whichever recipe is currently being used. You could also have extra blank pages punched, for future use. Just make sure that all pages are punched at the same time (not at a later date), so they all line up!

Best of luck to you.

(If this doesn't make sense, let me know and I can put in a photo of one of mine)