Calendar Girl

I've been keeping a daytimer style of calendar for almost as long as I can remember.  My mother found a stash of my earliest calendars last year, dating back to my high school days, and it was fun to read through them and see what I was doing (and with whom) back then.  I started keeping them as a way to keep track of school assignments, work shifts and social engagements and that system has pretty much carried through over the years.  I now have several boxes full of previous years' daytimers tucked away in my closet and I flip through them from time to time.

I usually keep the daytimer on my desk at work, since that's where I am for 5 out of 7 days a week.  In recent years, the focus of a lot of the entries tended to be "to do" lists of tasks that needed to get done on the job, which makes the contents a little less interesting.  I'm pretty sure that those lists of files and documents are not going to be something I'll care to read about in years to come.

As a result, this year, I wanted to do something a little more "artful" with my calendar, which I didn't think would be doable if I kept the calendar at the office.  Bizzy B started a calendar club a few months ago and that got me thinking I thought I might make a calendar for myself similar to what Kate Crane does, based on this tutorial she provided.  But I was feeling a bit lazy about the whole process and hadn't actually start making any background pages by the time December was drawing to a close, so I was glad when Santa left this basic desk calendar booklet in my stocking:

As usual, Santa knew exactly what I wanted.  The squares are just slightly bigger than the ones Kate uses and the pages are basically blank so I can do anything I want with them.

You can imagine how even more excited about the whole project my still-feeling-lazy self became when I discovered that Graphics 45 had come out with some calendar themed scrapbook paper with a vintage style. Bizzy B had the January, April and November pages in stock a few weeks ago (not sure why they didn't have the other months in stock, presumably they were either already sold out or back ordered but I will be sure to check next time I'm there to see if they have them available) so I quickly put this January sheet

to good use, cutting it up and gluing it into my book.  Here's how my page is looking these days:

It may be a little less personalized than Kate's style of calendar but it's still unique enough for my purposes right now.  I'm quite enjoying how it is coming along and looking forward to continuing with this project over the course of the year.  I do have to make an effort to keep the entries up-to-date or at least pencil little notes on various days to help me remember what happened when, although now that I'm into the 3rd week, it is getting to be more of a routine.  As you can see in the photo above, on those days where there wasn't anything worth reporting or I couldn't remember, I simply added one of the pretty Graphics 45 images to fill in the square.

The collage I made last night (and described in yesterday's blog post) is located on the inside cover of this booklet.  I haven't decided whether I will do anything with the front cover, I kind of like it the way it is but I'll probably want to play with it a little bit (I have an urge to gesso over those flowers and layer things up a bit).  No worries, there's lots of time for that, it's only January after all!