The 2009 Gift Quest
Calendars make great gifts. Time honored, tried and true, just about everyone has multiple calendars. Our gifts this year were hybrid wall calendars. We waited until after Christmas to show them off online because we didn’t want to give away the gifts. Now that they’ve all been distributed and all your gifts have gone out, you can treat yourself to this great project before the year gets too far underway.
Pick Your Style
After deciding to make calendars, I scoured the internet for ideas and found some fabulous versions of calendars. My favorites were a desk calendar made from an acrylic frame and the cube calendars from Pine Cone Press. Links below.
At first my active imagination envisioned created a different style of calendar for every person on our list. I wanted to do some 12-photo calendars and some 4 photo calendars, and a those desk top stamped calendars. Alas, reality of time and budget set in, and we came up with some great calendar gifts made mostly from supplies on hand.
Sir Henry had been given a pack of ink jet photo paper and we had a color ink jet printer full of ink. We had access to a coil binding system and coils, internet calendar printing sites, and solid card stock. (I needed 13 pieces of 12” square cardstock for each calendar so I ended up purchasing some additional paper on sale at a local craft store. The only other purchase I made was adhesive and cutting blades.
In the end eight family members received calendars. After those eight we ran out of photo paper and time, so we made other arrangements for friends and extended family. Click here to see photo chip cans.
The process:
1.
We designed an overall template which was a 10” square base with two pages for every month. One page had the photo scrapbook page and one page had the days of the month.
2.Go to a free printable pages site on the internet and print the pages for each month eight times (or extra to allow for the inevitable).
3.Although I wanted different photos in each calendar, a few of them would remain the same. Creating a chart with names of recipients down the left side and months of the year across the top helped sort out my work load. I filled in the photos I wanted to use for each month beside each person’s name.
4.For a few of the months, I used scans of paper created layouts or previously created digital layouts as the entire photo. I loved the layouts and knew they would too. It also cut down on the number of new digital creations I needed to make.
5.For the remaining photos I designed about 8 different digital templates and just inserted photos in them to personalize. The October page might look the same on all eight calendars except that the photo for Sir Henry’s daughter would be different than the one for my niece.
6.Once all layouts and month pages are printed, the assembly can begin. I took the pages to a crop where my friend Kayla (thanks Kay-Kay) helped me get them all trimmed in one session.
7.Next I used the chart to sort pages by recipient and month. I matted the photos and month pages on cardstock and did a bit of inking and stamping to add dimension.
8.I created a cover (the same cover) for all the calendars with what I call the “reverse hybrid” technique. I used a paper created collage and scanned it into a digital layout.
9.After lining up all the pages with covers Sir Henry did the power tool part by attaching a coil binding to each calendar.
Tips and Plans:
--I designed each page as a 12 by 12 square and let the printer adjust them to 8” by 8” so that I could use them for other things.
--I’m going to make an album of all the pages to keep for us.
--We used photos from family vacations and events throughout the year, so there were pictures from the '60's through today.
--We’re saving copies of the pages for our own digital scrapbook and to remind us which photos we used if we ever want to do this again. We also saved the blank digital templates so the process would be easier.
--Many digital sites sell lovely templates you can buy and swap out photos for those instead of designing your own.
