Thursday, January 6, 2011

Star desktop calendar tutorial


For the past couple of years I have been making calendars for my parents and grandparents using photos of the past year. This year, I came up with this one:

Supplies:
2 sheets of cardstock of the same color
various patterned papers (not too dark since we are going to print on them)
temporary adhesive
12 photos cropped to 2.5X3"
17" of ribbon
embellishments of your choice

- Cut your cardstock in 6X12" strips. You will only need three of them.
- Score each one every three inches and fold in an accordion.
- Glue back to back as shown here by the red arrows:

- Cut 14 pieces of patterned papers to roughly 3.5X6 (don't worry about being exact as we will trim them later)
- Download the free 2011 CD calendar template found here (the first one, not the quarters one):

- Print one of the pages (anyone):
- Place onto your print, two pieces of your patterned paper positioned so that the calendar part will get printed on the bottom. Attach with temporary adhesive, double sided tape, or since that was all I had, masking tape!
- Put you sheet back into your printer to print onto your patterned paper:
- Repeat the same thing for each month (=6 printouts)

- Now, all you have to do is assemble! Crop your printed patterned papers to 2 7/8"x 5 7/8" (I decided to crop my patterned papers to size after printing them just so I could center the print better).
- Attach photos and embellish as you wish.
- Last, for the cover and back page, adhere the ribbon (with the calendar closed) and glue your remainding two cropped pieces of patterned paper on top of it so that it is completely secured.
- Decorate your cover.


Note: If you are gifting this calendar, feel free to add on the back page the little illustration below with the following explanation:
Open the knot, place the front and back pages together and tie the ribbon to display your star shaped calendar:


And you are done! I hope that you will give this fun project a go! Share yours with us if you do!

2 comments:

Anna said...

I really like this idea, awesome job!

Carrie said...

Really love this. Thanks for the idea!