Tutorial : Recycle a Little Golden Book into a Recipe Journal

I have been collecting recipes out of magazines and from family and friends for a couple of years now.  Needless to say I have countless bits of paper everywhere housing these recipes and so had been looking for a recipe journal to transfer them all in to.  

The problem with a lot of recipe journals is that they look *blergh*... or cost too much.... so I decided to make my own out of an old Little Golden Book:

Here is how I did it...

First I cut off the front and back covers, getting rid of the spine and the inside pages (I am going to use the pages for another craft):

Next I made some marks down the left hand side of the cover roughly 1cm in from the spine at the following intervals: 3cms, 7cms, 12cms and 17cms:

Then I used a 1/4 inch leather punch and a hammer and punched holes in both the front and back covers.

Next I cut some paper into sheets measuring 19cms x 13.5cms and used the leather punch to punch holes in the longer side to match up with the holes made in the cover:

I then made some divider cards out of card.  To do this I cut 4 pieces of cardstock into 26cm x 18cm pieces and folded them in half:

 

Down the folded side, I then marked out a rectangle measuring 3cms x 1cm, beginning a centimetre from the top of the page:

Next, lay the cardstock flat and carefully cut the rectangle out:

When the cardstock is folded in half again, you will then have a tab like below:

Continue the process on the remaining 3 pieces of cardstock, making sure you stagger the tabs so that they are all visible when the four pieces of cardstock are placed on top of each other:

I chose to make pockets from my dividers by gluing the bottom edge of the folded cardstock together, but you don't need to do that if you don't want.  I figured it would give me somewhere to store the cut out recipes while I was getting the motivation to glue them into the book.

Anyway, once you've cut the tabs on your dividers, you need to label them.  I have only labeled three of my four tabs with 'desserts', 'baking' and 'mains'.  I couldn't decide what to write on my fourth tab so figured I would just decide later on.

Grab some metal rings from your local scrapbooking supply shop:

and put it all together like so:

Once that is done, you're ready to paste in your recipes!

Oooh White Chocolate and Coconut Slice.  Sounds yum!