Drum Roll, please - 2022's Cookie Book!

Hey Everyone!  After a respite of 2 whole years, I got back into the swing of things in the craft cave and produced a cookie book for the sort-of-annual Cookie Exchange.  If you don't remember or are starting at the top of the blog as a new reader, this thing started way back in 2006 as a way for me to make more stuff in my craft cave.  I was never a scrap booker, but always a card maker. I wanted to do more with books, and thus the idea of a recipe book for a Christmas cookie exchange was born.  You can scroll down the list of posts all the way to the bottom and find all the books I've created over the years.  Each one is unique and crafted all by hand by yours truly.  Some years were skipped, like the year I moved to Brookfield.  And of course, we lost a couple to Covid. One year I couldn't get enough bakers to join the fun so I cancelled it.  Its all good.  

If you sign on as a baker, you send me your recipe, I approve it so we have no duplication, and it has to be from scratch as well.  No piping Santa hats on Nutter Butters at this cookie exchange, no sir.  We top out at 15 bakers, so you have to make 15 dozen of your cookies and package them for giving away.  You go home with 14 dozen different home baked cookies and a pretty cool Christmas Keepsake book, if I do say so myself.  

Without further ado, here is the book for 2022.  I make 25 of these things.  It takes me all year.  Not one of them is exactly like any other.  So, like I said, it keeps me in my craft room, happy and making stuff.  Fifteen for the bakers, my sisters each get one, and then some longtime friends who are far away get theirs too.  

Here they are ready for final cover decoration.  You can see all the colors of the felt I used.  Some are whole pieces of felt and others are scraps sewn together.  There are three ring binders holding the pages to the felt. The gold brads at the back of the book are screwed into the ring binders.  

Here is the cover, all wrapped and ready to give.  I started putting a bell on the books each year because I just like the sound of those things while I'm crafting the books.  A little jingle as they get their final touches is never a bad thing. 

Unwrap the leather tie and open the book to reveal the cover page.  We're Back and Baking! was this year's theme.  

Each page was cut and folded into a pocket.  There is a bit of dimension to them.  The paper is all two-sided card stock, so I folded down a lip on each page to show both sides.  I had a GIANT pack of dimensional gift tags I picked up from Costco maybe 8-10 years ago that got used for decorating the right-hand pages. Even after 25 books I still have not used up that whole pack. Gads.  

You can kind of see the dimension on the left-hand page here.  

Each page is numbered behind the recipe to correspond to the table of contents at the beginning of the book. I tried to make the page numbers look like a frosted cookie.  Not sure if I pulled that off, really.  But it worked either way. 

So that's it!  Now we are just sitting around waiting for the fat man to fly over and then on to the new year.  My shoe box of happiness (the place where I keep my finished cards) is absolutely empty.  I have nothing prepped and ready for any holiday next year.  I guess I better get busy.  

Happy Christmas, one and all!