Wedding Blog

You have seen me make traditional veils, birdcage veils, and hair clips. You have seen me bring a damaged wedding dress train back to life. You have seen me make a tie for Mr. T, and even make a dress out of a bed sheet!

For my next trick, I will transform two of these cookie sheets into a gift for Mr. Taffy:

This was a pre-Weddingbee project. When I was brainstorming gift ideas last year, I really wanted to design something that would impress Mr. Taffy. It was our first Christmas as a couple, and I wanted to knock his socks off! He was already familiar with my sewing skills, so I wanted to make something without the use of my sewing machine.

Mr. Taffy is also very practical, so I wanted to make him a gift that would solve a problem. The first thing that I thought of was our recipe collection—we had been cooking together for months, and really loved it. I would usually find the recipes online, and we would either print them out or use the laptop while cooking. After we were finished, we didn’t have a spot to put the printed recipes, and we would lose them and have to reprint. Since we are both interested in recycling, that wasn’t a great method, and we hated having the laptop near the stove and kitchen sink.

I decided to make a cookbook with pages that we could write all of our favorite recipes into. The book would have a binder, so we could easily rearrange the content. I wanted to make the book out of objects that I already owned (we are also into reusing!), which was a bit of a challenge. One day I was arranging my kitchen cabinet, and noticed that I had an overabundance of air bake cookie sheets. I thought that they would be perfect for this project, and I was right!

Here is the finished product:

Here it is open:

I used recycled paper to print these lined pages; this way we could write the recipe down straight from the laptop (after trying it out, of course!). There are plenty of sheets for future recipes that we will find and love.

A friend who is much more graphically inclined than I designed our front page in Illustrator. We will call this friend “la ninja”.

I love the way she designed our initials!

In this view you can really see the resemblance to its original form and purpose. You can also see the great patina on the aluminum. That is one of the best parts to me—we had used these cookie sheets to make many meals together, and it shows in the metal finish!

I love how the embossed areas make it look so hardcore!

The book stands up easily on its own, which comes in handy.

It also lies completely flat, so the pages aren’t popping up all of the time. We hate that!

Here it is, living harmoniously with our other cookbooks.

Mr. Taffy was quite impressed with the gift, and we use it all of the time! Any time we cook something new, we joke about whether it is good enough to “make it into the book”. I’m so glad that it turned out so well.

How it was made:

I definitely needed some help to make my concept a reality; I never had to cut metal before and did not know where to start. I had some friends that worked with metal help me with the cutting and assembly. I knew that since the cookie sheets were insulated (hollow inside), we could slip the spine into the openings and glue it together. Then we recycled an old binder ring and glued it to the inside of the spine. And let’s not forget “la ninja”, whose awesome graphic design skills made the inside of the book as lovely as the outside. I am lucky to have such creative friends to collaborate with!

If you like this idea (it would also make a great shower gift) but don’t have the resources to cut metal, I would suggest finding a cool binder (old or new) and decorating the cover with pictures, old recipes, vintage cooking clip art or whatever strikes your fancy! You can also find really nice stainless steel or aluminum binders if you would like a similar look to ours.

Have you ever tried a DIY gift that was outside of your comfort zone?