Covers Made Easy

• Plastic school binders, preferably with clear covers into which you can slide materials, are a perfect way to keep all your information together in an attractive and organized way. You can buy clear, three-ring display pages to protect recipes. The best part about these binders is they provide a solid cover surface on which to work, which is already connected to the rest of the notebook. You can decorate the cover to your liking by gluing material directly onto it or by sliding a piece of decorated paper under the plastic display. If you do not have a display cover to protect your artwork, consider investing in clear contact paper to cover the surface. Remember that cookbooks are not just for display; they need to be durable and water-resistant.
  
  

Collage Patterns

• For anyone who enjoys scrapbooking, a collage pattern might be the natural step in decorating a recipe cover. By placing different flat materials such as old recipes or handwritten notes, leaves and fun stickers next to and on top of each other in attractive patterns, you can easily personalize any recipe book cover. Consider using old recipes that you no longer need or have since recopied and decorate around this material with colorful words and stickers. Personalize it with your name or a favorite quote about cooking. You can buy collage items in any craft section or use what you have around the house and kitchen; it will not be hard to combine the usefulness of a cookbook with the artistry and memories of a scrapbook.
  
  

Recipe of the Week

• Another idea for personalizing a recipe cover is to use it to display a special, such as a restaurant's menu sometimes does. For anyone who cooks a lot or constantly has hungry family members wondering what is for dinner, this could be a clever and fun design. You will probably need a plastic display binder so that it will be easy to change your menu. Create a border by hand or on your computer that is roughly the size of a standard sheet of paper. You may want to include a heading, such as "Recipe of the Week" or "Today's Special." Leave a large blank space in the middle of the page onto which you can tape a smaller piece of paper. This way, you can insert recipes straight from your files, or you can recopy them with a description to be featured as they would on a restaurant menu. As soon as you get bored with the featured recipe, you can quickly change to another one.