I could not believe my eyes yesterday afternoon when I got home to find Grandma’s cookbook in the mailbox. We just ordered it late last Sunday night. Here they are in all their printed glory!
Tada! It’s totally profesh! We ordered the hardcover book with the dust flap on the shiny paper. Very, very nice. I’ve had a few people ask how we did it, so here’s how we made that happen. It was a group effort, that’s for sure.
1) Pick out the recipes you want to use.
Thankfully, my aunts and my mom took care of sorting through all the recipes and decided on 30 of the family favourites. As an aside, this turned out to be a good amount when it came time to use the template we did. We didn’t have to add any additional pages to the book, so that kept the cost of of printing down.
But back to the recipes – they picked them out, typed them out and proofread them all for us. This made it easy for us to transfer into the book template. Mom emailed the recipes over to me.
2) Pick some family photos.
Again, another team effort. My sister has a great scanner, so with the help of my mom and my Aunts, they dug up all kinds of great photos of my Grandma throughout her life. Because the cookbook is for my Grandma’s birthday, we decided to keep the focus on Grandma. We also included her wedding photos because 1)they are awesome and 2) because we kind of saw that as a good starting point for the recipes – a start of her family. My sister sent over many and it made it easier to decide which photos should go in the book that way. The others? She shared them on facebook for all our family to see and I used some on my blog for a good time.
Added bonus: Have your sister scan in some of your mom’s recipe cards on the Q.T. – make sure she picks the recipe cards with lots of writing and stains from the ingredients from Christmas cakes made in the past. They look awesome in the book!
Technical details: Photos in print require a quality file than the web photos. When using photos for print work, it’s best to have them scanned in at 300 DPI (dots per inch). However, we were still able to use the smaller DPI photos with the template we chose, so it all worked out in the end. Mike even made a lovely collage with 6 of Grandma’s smaller photos to create one large file and that turned out amazing. If you have access to photoshop and are good at that kind of thing, you can make it work!
3) Start baking and taking photos.
I had delusions of grandeur by thinking I’d cook every single recipe in the book in 2 weekends, plus take all the photos and do all the edits to the photos for the book. Clearly I need to work on my time management skills. What I did do was get all the ingredients for the recipes, so I was able to mix it up – make some of the recipes and take photos of the ingredients. I also had to cheat on the roast turkey recipe and use an older photo of turkey I just happened to have on hand. SEE! You never know when you may need a photo of a roast turkey. Learn from me! (I never do) Start sooner.
4) Find an online book publishing company.
***Full disclosure: Blurb has no idea who I am. I’m about to sing their praises. They did a great job for this project.***
Mike found blurb.com while researching book publishing companies and picked them because of their template system and because they ship to Canada in a timely fashion. They have a good variety of cookbook templates to choose from! From there, Mike cut and pasted the recipes in and put the photos in for each recipe. We both went over it and over it to ensure we had the right photo with the correct recipe. Mike is awesome at layout and the aesthetics in print – so he was able to adjust the size of the photos within the template. They have some kind of adjuster thing-a-ma-bob within the template. They are great templates to work with! Now that we’ve gone through the process once, doing it again will be easy.
5) Read, re-read, and re-read the book again before submitting it to print.
Re-read it again before pressing submit.
6) Follow the directions on the blurb website and soon you’ll have a preview link for your cookbook.
Here’s the link to Grandma’s cookbook.
7) Sit back and wait a week (or less!) for your book to be mailed to you in Canada.
Open your package and SQUEEE! With delight at your totally professional cookbook for your Grandma’s 90th birthday party. Huzzah!
9) Sleep in until 10 am the day after you’ve received your cookbook.
That’s what I did today.
Phew! We did it!
