Sunday, December 13, 2015

2015 Cookie Book - Flour & Butter & Sugar, Oh My!

Happy Holidays Readers!  It seems this blog has become a once a year thing with me, focusing on the Christmas holiday and the annual Cookie Book.  Maybe I should make it a New Year's resolution to post more often?  Maybe add to that a You Tube Channel and videos...hmmm.  That may have to wait for when I'm retired.  We'll see...

On to the annual cookie book for 2015.  I did skip a year last year due to the move, so this year I wanted to do something really cool and out of the ordinary.  I resized and revamped a version of a coupon book I did many years ago for the now defunct scrapbook store in Cedarburg.  I up-sized it from the original Valentine Coupon/Ticket book idea and toned down the wacky-ness of the page toppers to be more uniform. 

The book jacket I built from 12x24 sheets of paper.  Each top edge was punched with a different design.  The titles were cut with the Cricut.  I stamped the &'s and the little 'Oh My' tag to bring in a bit more of the hand made look and feel to the cover. 

The book covers were done with acrylic paint and my Gelli Print toys.  I pulled two prints from he same paint spread to make a front and back cover.  Sometimes the second print, or ghost print, was not "book-worthy," so I combined it with something not exactly matching.  That's the beauty of a Gelli print.  No two are ever quite the same.  This helps make each book unique for the recipient.  I like to make one of kind things, even though I make 24 of them.  Each is just a little bit different. 

The pages were pulled from my stash of paper, focusing on black and white first, then adding in craft brown and then one Christmas color - red, green, teal, what-have-you.  Again, no two books have exactly the same set of paper in it. 

The recipe cards were cut with the Cricut after spending some time in the design studio getting the shape I wanted.  Then the recipes were printed, corners notched, stars stamped on the pages, and inserted one by one.