| Gifts from the Oven | |
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There are two things I really love to do. I love to bake (and to write about baking) and I love to scrapbook. Scrapbooking combines properly preserving photos with journaling on creatively decorated pages. In fact, I just spent this last weekend scrapbooking. I, and three other women, spent the entire weekend locked in a suite at a hotel, no kids and no husbands. Heaven!
By combining my two loves, I came up with two fantastic gifts that you can give, too. The first gift is to make a personalized dessert recipe book. The other is similar, but only features one dessert recipe in a frame. Below you will find complete step-by-step instructions for gifts that will be treasured for years to come.
Enjoy!
Supply List
7 inch by 5 inch, 20 page, acid free and lignin-free, spiral-ringed binder (Photos and recipes that are free of anything containing acid will last for generations.)
photo safe adhesive
photo safe permanent markers
sharp scissors
dessert recipes (20 or less)
corresponding photos (20 or less)
acid-free, lignin-free colored papers (coordinate with photo colors)
Step One
Choose your favorite dessert recipes.
Step Two
Choose a family photo or a small story to go with each recipe.
Step Three
Purchase your supplies at local craft store.
Step Four
Work on your page layout before writing or gluing anything in the album. Save the cover and first page for last. The layout depends on the length of your recipes. A layout consists of two pages facing each other. I would place photos (or a short note about the recipe's history) on the left and the recipe on the right.
Step Five
Let's get started. The first layout will be the hardest. Once you get the hang of the craft, it becomes much easier. First choose a piece of colored paper to mat the photo. If Aunt Edna has purple flowers on her dress in the picture, I'd choose purple. You may need to crop (cut the photo to better fit the page and be more flattering to Aunt Edna) the photo. Cut the mat to be a 1/4-inch around the outside edge of the photo. On the recipe side, I would copy the recipe on a piece of the same purple paper (the size should be slightly smaller that the binder page.) You could also just copy the recipe directly onto the binder page using purple ink to pick up to mat color. If you have a recipe that might need both sides of the layout, you may wish to use a border around the outside edges of the page. There are also special stickers that can help decorate the page.
Step Six
The front cover and the title page may be one in the same. The title page might just have a little more information. The cover could say: "The Smith Family Dessert Recipes." The title page could say the same but also include the date the book was created, who created it and who the book was given to as a gift. You may just wish to put a family photo on the front.
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