DIY Valentine: Restaurant Passport

On the lookout for an idea (any idea) of something to give my hubby for Valentines Day (I am notoriously unromantic, to the point of often forgoing gifts), I ran across this little gem on Pinterest.
What an awesome idea, especially considering we often find ourself (just as Steph did) hitting up the same restaurants time and again. My food restrictions don't help and because of said restrictions I often get stuck picking where we eat. So, what better way to offer him a little control over where we eat than giving him a prepared list of restaurants that offer food I can eat. Plus it makes for a fun way to ensure that we try some new places this year.

The problem: My hand-writing is awful and all I could imagine was how junky a notebook with my writing in it would look. So, I decided why not make something that looks a little bit nicer, and so I did.

The notebook: I found at Dollar Tree (for, you guessed it, $1). Next I needed to print up the pages to go inside. I figured out that if I could find a template that would do 6 to a page it would work perfect. Since I suck at Word and have no idea how to make a template from scratch, I did a little search and found one I could modify and created the template to the left. If you'd like this template just email me and I'll be happy to send it to you.

I then printed the template onto 8x11 sticker paper to make things easier.  And attached a little heart sticker onto each page (so we can mark off when each restaurant is visited).  I didn't put the restaurants into any particular order. Thinking about this, I probably should have alphabetized them to make them easier to find when we do visit them.  I'm also thinking that some restaurants may get visited multiple times, so I should probably add some extra stickers in the back.

I put the stars on the pages so that we could fill in a rating for each restaurant. Also, I only put one restaurant every other page, leaving the left hand page empty. I figured this would give us space to write our thoughts, or share anything special about that visit.  If you wanted, you could also fill in the stars to indicate price-range. I think if I did that, I'd only do 3 stars on the page. 

Next was the Passport Cover. Initially, I was going to try to modify the looks of an actual Passport cover, but as I played with it and found a cool picture, I changed my mind.  A big thank you to Boudewijn Berends for making this photo available via creative commons.  I edited it just a bit to add the text "2013 Restaurant Passport", printed it out on another sticker sheet and stuck it on the cover of my notebook.  Here are the end results.

If I did it again I'd buy a different type of notebook. Instead of a cheap $1 notebook, I'd find a journal type notebook that was made to stretch out. I already noticed that a page in the back of this notebook is coming loose.  I've got time so I'm tempted to redo it.