An Organized Mess

A while back my friend Lauren and I decided it would be such a good idea to organize and share our recipes with each other.  Lauren found this cute idea on a blog and I cant remember where she found it from, but the pages were so cute, each section given a scrapbook paper to define them.  We thought that was cute and wanted to do one for ourselves.  Boy did we have a MAJOR project in store for us!  Let me tell you, the putting the binder together was sooo easy compared to typing up each recipe!  I have to say I think someone may have hit me on the head when I agreed that we should do this.  It has taken me...so far...2 weeks to type up the recipes I had in 1 binder...thats right ONE!  I didnt even type them all I copied and pasted them from the originating websites (thank you Betty Crocker/Better Homes and Gardens for making my life easier).  I do admit they look amazing all uniform and pretty with no food on them from previous cookings, but it really is a lot of work.  If you are going to take this project on be warned that it will take a looooong time to get all the recipes together.  What I would suggest is get the binder done first, then you can add the recipes as you go.  From the beginning of the blog I said that the idea came from a lady who did scrapbook paper on each page, yeah well we thought she was crazy because A) thats even more work and B)if you run out of paper and want to add more recipes you are screwed because then it wont be uniform, so we came up with our own twist to the idea.  Below you can see the binder I used (super cute from target!) and the index we made.



So for the index, we picked scrapbook paper that we liked and used Lauren's awesome scrapbooking supplies to make the circles, she had one of those big circle hold punchers so they are all the same size and awesome.  We found that centering the text and using an arrow to point to the corresponding circle worked best for us, but you may have a better idea so of course feel free to make it your own (we did!).  To make the tabs we realized that using sheet protectors hid the dividers and that stunk so what we did was take the 12x12 scrapbook paper and cut it down to 9 1/2 x 11 that way it stuck out enough that we can see it but not too far that it sticks out of the binder (trust me we cut that paper and measured so many times it was getting insane).  So once we had all the paper cut, we realized that it didnt do any good if it could just get wet/ripped/torn so Lauren with her amazing scrapbook supplies had 12x12 laminating sheets.  So we lamanated each sheet, 3-hold punched it and now had awesome dividers.  You can see some of the colors here, but the 2nd picture is a full shot of the divider.

Aside from the horror of typing up all the recipes, this project took all of 2 hours (with all the cutting and laminating and just plain being tired because of the rain) and looks awesome!  Now that this is all done I cant wait to get all my other recipes added to the binder.  If you make one share!  I would love to see what you came up with.

Project Housewife Out!

Im Linking up!  Come check me out!