For about a week leading up to New Year’s, I was on a quest to find a calendar for this year.  Every store I went to either didn’t have the right color combo I was going for, boring, not the right size or was WAY more than I wanted to pay.  So I pulled out my hand dandy phone and went to my pinterest app and voila!  A plethora of DIY calendars appeared.   I really liked the simplicity of this one and then I saw this one and fell in love with the personalization of it.  I decided I had to make it…right now!

Lucky for me, I just so happened to be close to my favorite craft store.  I ran in and grabbed some supplies. Here’s what you will need.

– Frame – I already had the frame (mine is 16×20, but you can do any size).  *Side note*  You DO NOT need to buy a brand new frame!  For around $3, you can go down to your local thrift store, pick up a picture/frame that is around 16×20.  You don’t even have to like the color,  as long as you like the shape/design.  Once you get it home, you spray paint it any color you’d like.  Which is exactly what I am going to do mine.  I think an oil rubbed bronze maybe…?  Black was SO last year.   Haha!

-Scrapbook paper – which you can usually find on sale, 5/$1!

– some sort of paper craft adhesive.  I used an adhesive tape runner to adhere all of the paper and some craft glue to add my embellishments

– an 11 x 17 calendar (you can download mine here).  I had mine printed in color at Kinko’s for $1.50 .  It would have only been $.59 but I’m picky and didn’t want my calendar to be black and white.  If black and white goes with your color scheme, you can save even MORE $!  Heck for that matter you can even print yours at home, if you already have the paper and your printer accommodates 11×17 paper.  Mine does, but like I said, I’m cheap and I really didn’t feel like spending $6 on a ream of 11×17 paper that I’ll probably never use again!  Like I said, Kinko’s – a buck fifty. Done.

Once you have all of your supplies together the first thing you’ll need to do is create a template to adhere your paper to.   Take a lg piece of cardboard or blank  white paper (I taped 4 pieces of white printer paper together to make mine big enough) and trace the glass onto the paper.  Cut it out.  This is your template.

Take your calendar and adhere it to the bottom left hand corner first and the “Notes”  section to the bottom right (sorry I don’t have a pdf of this).   The remaining space is left for you to fill.  Let your creativity lead you.  I made our family nameplate, pennants and banner on my Silhouette, but you could easily cut these out by hand.   If you need an image to trace, let me know and I’ll see if I can pull one together for you.  I also added some ribbon to separate the header from the calendar and to “hang” my pennants on.  You can’t really tell in the pics, but it’s there. 🙂

Ta da!

At first I used a regular dry erase marker but every time I needed to write something down, I would erase a date with my hand while I was writing.  It was quite frustrating, I must say.  I racked my brain and thought “oh great, after all this it’s not even going to work!”  BUT…I had some wet erase markers lying around  (you know, the ones our teachers would use to write on the transparency sheets in math class… No?…am i the only one who remembers that….) Anyway, THAT worked 10x’s better!

I really like how it turned out…hopefully now, I’ll be a little more organized and things that need to get done, will actually get done!  I have no excuse.  🙂