Family Cookbook

Fortunately, my family ignores the fact that I have a blog so I can post about family presents and they'll never see!

I mentioned in the previous apron post that I made a family cookbook. I've had the idea to do this for a long, long time but could never decide how to go about it. I considered one of the compilation style cookbooks with the plastic or wire comb binding that many publishers offered but I wanted to include photos and generally speaking, photos aren't an option. I thought a better way to go was with a photobook offered by various vendors (Snapfish, Shutterfly, Picaboo, etc.) Here is what I came up with (I took photos of the cookbook and created a collage with Picasa):


You can click on the photo and enlarge it several times if you want to see details.

If you're interested in the details of how to make one, continue reading! Otherwise, click to the next blog.

The books can get rather pricey - the version I purchased starts at $25 for 20 pages but in July, Snapfish came out with a buy one get TWO free deal. After shipping and tax, the total was $40 for 3 ($13 each). I want to make 9 to give to various family members but the offer was limited to 3. However, lo and behold, they offered the deal again two weeks ago so I bought 3 more! Hopefully, they'll have the deal again before the holidays so I can get the final 3.

It took some time to pull together but part of that was learning Snapfish's editing process. Everything that will be uploaded must be a jpg file. There may be a better way to do it but I started with a Word document for each recipe, printed to pdf and then used an online service to convert from pdf to jpg.

Snapfish has tons of page layouts - anything from one large jpg file per page to 12 or more jpg files. Some layouts have text boxes. So I varied the pages and figured out how to fit approx 25 recipes on the pages along with family photos, food photos plus a cover page and dedication page. Originally, I tried to crop the jpg's to fit the photo box but realized that is not necessary - it works better to do the cropping in Snapfish. Now that the book is a saved project, I can order more from Snapfish whenever I want.

I love all the options available. Different cover styles (I picked my favorite color in a linen cover); different "themes" for the pages (again purple!) and of course all the page layouts, photo sizes, fonts, etc.

It was a fun project and I'm happy with the results. I hope my daughter likes her cooking themed present! I'm finishing up another project for her tonight that I'll post about later in the week.