recipe re-do

for my mother-in-law's birthday, which was march 3rd, i was struggling to come up with something to get for her.  then i got the idea to reorganize her recipes for her!  now i use the term "reorganize" ridiculously loosely, as they were in no particular order.  this is what they looked like

they were literally just all shoved into a box, with no particular order. (and this photo is after she went through them all and got rid of the ones that she has never made and has no interest in making) as you can imagine, when you tried to find a recipe, it would take FOREVER to find it.  a couple times of helping her find a recipe and i was thoroughly annoyed.  anyways, what a perfect idea i thought!  it has taken me about a month (of working on it here and there) but i am finally done!  

i was unsure of the best way to organize them, but i decided on typing them up and putting them into a binder with plastic sleeves for each page, so she can take out a recipe she is using and not have to worry about spilling or splashing on it.  (note:  after typing the first 20 or so recipes, i contemplated quitting, and was debating her sanity as i had typed 3 chocolate cake recipes and 3 brownie recipes.  but i pushed through and here is the finished product!)  this is the cover:

there was supposed to be a border around the edges of the cover, but for some reason it refused to print that way and so i gave up trying ::shakes fist at printer::

here is a look of the divided and organized book (disregard my cute slippered feet, as i was too lazy to move and simply took the picture on my lap :-P)

most of the pages are of recipes that i typed up, which took the majority of the time to do, and then copied the file onto a disk so she will have that as well

some of them i just copied on our printer because there were multiple recipes on one page (look how old this one is!)

i got dividers with pockets so that she can put the recipes that she hasn't made but would like to try in them.  that way, if she's feeling liking making something different for dessert (which apparently is the only thing she might like to try, as all of the recipes of this category were desserts except 3 :-P), she can just pull them out of the pocket in that section

i am rather pleased with the finished product and hope that she likes it!