The Lady Lisa Book of Awesomeness

This weekend I spent a whole lot of time working on a project I've talked about doing for years. It's a simple thing, but took a lot on my part to conceptualize, and all these years I'd get started, not like where I was headed, stop working on it, and the project would eventually be put on permanent hold. Well this weekend it was hold no longer. I was getting this baby done.
The project started with a pile of magazines. I heart magazines. I find them full of useful information, (especially my Food & Wine) but I also find them full of increasingly annoying ads, and I hate having piles of magazines laying around my house. So I decided that every time I got a magazine (or catalog) in the mail, I would read it, immediately cut out articles or things I found interesting, then recycle the magazine. That way my house doesn't end up cluttered. Well the problem was obviously, now what do I do with all these scraps of articles I've saved forever? I needed some way to organize them.
At first I had purchased blank sketch books, and just rubber cemented the articles in. I found I didn't like this method though, because the articles were never in an order I could find them, and I'd skip from a page about what jeans to buy for my body shape to a recipe for peanut butter cup brownies. Not exactly successful unless the jeans article catered to the increasing size of my rear end due to all the brownies I was eating. Next I tried those picture albums with the sticky stuff on one side and the clear cover on top. I tried arranging my articles in these, but found that the sticky looses it's stick over time, and frankly, they just weren't big enough pages because of the holes punched in the side. I had several articles that wouldn't fit unless I cut them to shreds, and that didn't exactly fit my purpose for quick and easy indexing.
So this weekend I think I finally got a plan. I bought a giant stack of black cardstock from Michael's, a huge box of clear 8 1/2 x 11 page protectors, 4 roles of double-stick tape, and went to work. I decided to paste the articles onto sheets of the cardstock, slide them into the page protectors, then divide them up according to sections with page dividers. The page dividers ended up causing me a problem that I still haven't solved, but I think the organization of the sections was much more important and the missing piece I really needed. I picked two major categories, and here they are.

For the Cooking/Recipe Category:

1. Appetizers
2. Beverages
3. Baked Goods
   
4. Soups/Salads/Sandwiches
5. Side Dishes
6. Pastas
7. Sauces and Salsa's
   
8. Main Dishes
9. Desserts
10. Food Knowledge
    

For the "Other Stuff" Category:

1. Style
2. Beauty
3. Organization/Cleaning
4. Decorating
5. Life Advice
6. Exercise
7. Medical/Health
8. Gift Ideas
9. Travel
   
10. Seasonal
11. Stuff for Kids
    

I might have to add new sections as I go, but for now, everything I've saved over the years seems to be fitting into one of these arenas. I still can't believe how long it took to finally get this done, but I'm really proud of what I ended up with. It's a book fit for a Lady!