Bug Out Binder
Printing & Assembly Guide
Everything you need to print, organize, and build your binders. You don't have to do it all at once. Start with what you need, and build from there.
Core Binder
The Bug Out Binder
Your primary grab-and-go binder. Focused, practical, and built around the essentials you need if you had only minutes to leave. The main file covers the core survival and emergency system. Everything else in the BOB collection — survival recipes, projects, wallet cards, foraging cards, and more — is organized as supplemental original work you can add section by section.
Choose Your Binder
Use a 3-inch 3-ring binder for your main Bug Out Binder. This gives you room for the core file and your most essential supplemental sections without becoming too heavy to grab quickly.
Keep this binder focused on what matters in an emergency: emergency contacts, medical records, disaster plans, first aid, and your core survival sections. Supplemental material like survival projects, foraging cards, and recipes can live in a second binder or folder.
Print Your Files
All files are formatted for 8.5" x 11" paper. You can print on standard printer paper, cardstock for added durability, or weatherproof paper for long-term resilience in tough conditions.
Optional enhancements
- Sheet protectors for high-use sections like emergency contacts and first aid
- Tab dividers for navigation between sections
- Printed cover pages and spine labels are included — use them to finish the binder properly
Organize Your Sections
There is no single correct order. A simple starting structure that works well:
- Emergency Information & Contacts
- Medical Records & First Aid
- Survival Skills
- Food & Water
- Planning & Checklists
Rearrange this however makes sense for your life. The binder is meant to adapt to you, not the other way around.
Fill In Your Information
The emergency planning section includes fill-in pages for every family member: emergency contacts, medical history, school contacts, pet records, and more. Fill these in before anything else — this is the part of the binder that matters most in an actual emergency.
Store copies of important documents — identification, insurance, legal paperwork — directly in the binder or in a waterproof pouch alongside it.
Build Beyond the Core
Your main binder is for immediate use. Your full system can grow into a complete library of self-reliance. Use additional binders for the Natural Health Binder, recipes, gardening and farming, emergency planning expansions, and skills reference material.
Think of this as a system that expands with your life — not something you finish once.
Store a Digital Backup
Keep a digital copy of your complete Bug Out Binder on a flash drive or external hard drive. This gives you offline access to everything — all guides, books, manuals, and textbooks — anytime you need it without an internet connection.
Original Work · Included Free
The Natural Health Binder
The Natural Health Binder is its own complete system — a physical herbal reference library designed to be beautiful as well as useful. The card collection in particular is designed to be printed, cut, and organized into photo album pages, creating something that looks and feels like a professional reference collection rather than a stack of printed PDFs.
Choose Your Binder
Use a 2-inch 3-ring binder for the Natural Health Binder. This gives you enough room for the guides, card collection, and planners while staying manageable. As your collection grows — adding notes, blank cards you've filled in, new guides — you can move to a larger binder.
Print Your Files
All guides are formatted for 8.5" x 11" paper. Standard printer paper works well for guides and planners. For the card collection, cardstock gives you a more substantial feel and holds up better over time.
The files are organized by topic, so you can print only what you want to start with and add more as you go.
Set Up the Card Collection
This is where the Natural Health Binder becomes something special. The card collection includes herb illustration cards, remedy cards, healing tonic cards, recipe cards, and reference cards — each designed to print 4-up on a standard 8.5" x 11" sheet, four cards per page, cut along the trim lines.
The cards fit into standard photo album refill pages, which hold up to regular use and give the collection a finished, organized look. Two sizes are used throughout the collection:
Card sizes and photo album inserts
- 3.5" x 5" photo album refill pages — for remedy cards and smaller reference cards
- 7" x 5" photo album refill pages — for herb illustration cards and larger recipe cards
Print on cardstock, cut along the trim lines, and slide each card into its photo page sleeve. The result is a visually rich, tactile reference collection. Both insert sizes are linked on the recommended supplies page.
If you prefer not to cut, the cards can also be printed as-is and stored flat in sheet protectors or directly in the binder.
Organize Your Sections
The pages are intentionally left unnumbered so you have complete freedom to organize however makes sense to you. A suggested starting sequence:
- Healing Herbs & Remedies
- Herbal First Aid Kit
- Natural Antibiotics & Remedies
- Healing Tonics & Recipes
- Old-Fashioned Remedies
- Self-Care & Meal Planning
- Natural Cleaning
- Medical History & Planner
You can create separate binders for specific topics — herbs, garden planning, self-care, natural cleaning — as your collection grows. The blank remedy cards are there for you to document your own family remedies and notes over time.
Additional Resources
Your purchase also includes health guides and old books from the expansion library that pair naturally with the Natural Health Binder. Print the materials most relevant to your interests and add them to your binder, or save them digitally on a flash drive for offline access.
Original Work · Included Free
The Old Fashioned Recipe Binder
A kitchen system built around traditional from-scratch cooking. The Recipe Binder is designed to be used — kept in the kitchen, pulled out while cooking, filled in with your own notes and additions over time.
Choose Your Binder
A 1.5 to 2-inch 3-ring binder works well for the Recipe Binder. You'll want room for the recipe collections, blank recipe cards you fill in, and the kitchen system pages — meal planner, inventory tracker, and conversion guide.
Print Your Files
All files are formatted for 8.5" x 11" paper. Cardstock holds up better in a kitchen environment. For the blank recipe cards, heavier paper makes them easier to write on and more durable for regular use.
Sheet protectors work well for recipes you use frequently — they stay clean and flat even next to a stove.
About the recipe cards
- All recipe cards are formatted 4-up per 8.5" x 11" sheet — four cards per page, cut along the trim lines
- Cards are sized to fit standard photo album refill pages for a clean, organized result
- Print on cardstock for best results, especially if you plan to handle them regularly in the kitchen
About the Recipe Collections
The Recipe Binder includes two recipe collections, each with a different origin and character.
The Old Fashioned Recipe Collection is original work — traditional recipes researched, written, and formatted specifically for this binder. These are ready to use as-is.
The Recipes from Old Books collection is something different. These recipes were sourced directly from old books — some over a hundred years old — opened as PDFs, the individual recipes cut out in Photoshop, and arranged one per card. They carry the character of their era, including the way people wrote about cooking before modern appliances existed.
Reading old recipes — a note on temperature and time
Old recipe books did not always specify exact oven temperatures. Older ovens had no temperature control knobs — cooks used their judgment and the intensity of the fire. Recipes from that era use descriptive terms rather than numbers. Here are the modern equivalents:
- Slow oven — 250°F to 325°F
- Moderate oven — 350°F to 375°F
- Hot oven — 400°F to 425°F
Cooking times in old recipes are equally approximate. General guidelines:
- Cakes and cookies — 10 to 15 minutes
- Bread and rolls — 20 to 30 minutes
- Roasted meats — 15 to 20 minutes per pound
- Casseroles and baked dishes — 30 to 45 minutes
Test for doneness the old-fashioned way: a thermometer, a toothpick, or your own judgment. When in doubt, add a few minutes. If browning too fast, reduce the temperature or cover with foil. These recipes were written by people who cooked by feel — you can too.
Organize Your Sections
A natural starting structure for the Recipe Binder:
- Old Fashioned Recipe Collection
- Recipes from Old Books
- Blank Recipe Cards (your own additions)
- Meal Planner
- Inventory Tracker
- Kitchen Conversion Guide
- The Prepper Pantry Food Storage Guide
The editable recipe cards and tabs let you add your own recipes and customize the organization to match how your kitchen works.
Make It Yours
The blank recipe cards are there for a reason. As you cook through the collection, add your own notes, substitutions, and family recipes. A kitchen binder that has your handwriting in it, your variations, the things your family actually makes — that's something different from a printed cookbook. That's what this is meant to become.
Expand with the Library
The expansion library includes food and kitchen resources formatted at 8.5" x 11" that pair naturally with the Recipe Binder — public domain guides covering the deeper craft of traditional food preparation.
Relevant expansion library guides to add
- Canning and preserving — water bath, pressure canning, jams, jellies, and pickles
- Fermentation — lacto-fermentation, kombucha, kefir, sourdough, and cultured food guides
- Butter and dairy — butter making, cheesemaking, and home dairying guides
- Beekeeping and honey — hive management, harvesting, and mead making
- Dehydrating and drying — food dehydration, jerky, dried herbs, and long-term food storage
- Old cookbooks — wartime cookbooks, Depression-era recipes, and historical household guides
Print only what you're working on right now. Add guides behind a dedicated tab in your Recipe Binder or give them their own separate binder as that section grows. All guides are 8.5" x 11" and formatted for standard printing. The old books are various sizes and are better kept as standalone printed volumes.
The old books in particular are worth printing as complete standalone volumes — a 1940s canning guide or a Depression-era household manual has its own character that gets lost if it's broken into sections.
Bonus Library
The Expansion Library
The expansion library is not meant to be printed all at once. It is a reference collection — old books, public domain guides, military field manuals, open-access textbooks — organized and available whenever you want to go deeper on any topic. You decide what to print, when to print it, and how to organize it. There is no wrong approach.
Keep It Digital First
The simplest approach is to save the entire library to a flash drive or external hard drive and keep it somewhere accessible. This gives you offline access to everything — hundreds of guides, books, and manuals — without printing a single page until you need something specific.
A flash drive with the full library is a genuine emergency resource in itself. No internet required, no subscription, no cloud access needed.
Print What You're Actually Using
Rather than printing everything at once, print the guides you're actively learning from. Working on beekeeping this season? Print the beekeeping guides and add them to a dedicated binder. Getting serious about foraging? Print the field guides and plant identification resources.
This approach keeps your physical library focused and relevant to where you are right now, rather than an overwhelming stack of material you'll get to someday.
Build Topic Binders
One of the most satisfying ways to work with the expansion library is to build dedicated binders around topics that interest you. A few ideas to get started:
Binder ideas from the library
- A homesteading reference binder — farming, gardening, canning, animal husbandry, and building guides all in one place
- A herbal medicine deep-dive — old medical books, plant identification guides, and remedy references beyond the Natural Health Binder
- A homeschool library — open-access textbooks in science, history, mathematics, and the natural world, printed and organized by subject
- A skills and trades binder — blacksmithing, carpentry, leatherwork, garment making, soap making, and other hands-on craft guides
- A nutrition and fitness reference — military fitness manuals, nutrition guides, and health resources organized for daily reference
- A preparedness deep-dive — nuclear preparedness, chemical hazard guides, emergency planning manuals, and military field guides
Each of these can be built over time, one guide at a time, as your interests develop and your shelf space allows.
The Old Books
The old books in the library — wartime cookbooks, historical homesteading guides, early farming manuals, Victorian-era herbals — are worth treating differently from the reference guides. These are complete works with their own character and their own pace.
Print the ones that speak to you and keep them as standalone volumes — coil-bound or in their own binder — rather than mixing them into a larger reference system. A 1940s canning guide or a Depression-era household manual reads differently when it has its own spine.
Some of them are genuinely beautiful to page through. The knowledge is practical, but the experience of reading a century-old herbal or a wartime cookbook is something else entirely.
No Pressure to Print Everything
The library is there when you want it. You are not behind if you haven't printed any of it. The three core binders are the foundation — the library is the depth behind them, available when curiosity or circumstance calls for it.
Start with the binders. Come back to the library when something pulls you in.