Happy New Year!
I love a fresh, new calendar. Blank date squares, just waiting to be updated with school holidays and appointments.
I started creating photo calendars for both sets of offspring grandparents (and one for us) before Offspring3 was born. Beginning the year Offspring2 was in 5th grade (the teacher was this fireball of perpetual motion, she “shamed” me into printing at home…which is really more expensive than uploading the files to a website and having it printed, BUT you can print really close to Christmas and not worry about shipping time!), I started printing the calendar at home. Luckily, both our elementary school and middle school had comb binding machines, so I could punch holes if I had the calendar printed before school closed for the holiday break.
The year Offspring3 was in 7th grade, we had so much snow the week before Christmas that school closed before I had a chance to punch my calendars…I wound up at Office Depot on Christmas Eve, and they punched the holes for free! Last year, Staples put a comb binding machine on sale, and I took the bait and bought it. Being able to punch holes at the last minute made it worth its weight in gold!
About 5 years ago, I started dabbling in digital scrapbooking (for the calendars only), so my calendars got exponentially more complex than a photo or two per page. I found lots of free digital scrapping kits online, and used those with my photo editor (I have an old copy of Microsoft Digital Image Standard 2006). Last year, I splurged and bought Stampin’ Up!’s My Digital Studio on sale, and used that exclusively for the past two calendars. I struggle, I have not purchased any additional add-ons, and I would love MORE embellishments. Maybe next year.
For the past 3 years, I have vowed that I will start the calendar process sometime in the summer, so I am not stressed out somewhere around December 20th. Yeah, that worked for me this year…NOT! I started the entire process on December 22nd. I did honestly print/punch/bind these on Christmas Eve.
So, one of my resolutions for 2014 is to REALLY start the 2015 calendar during the summer months of 2014.
(This cover is one of my sunrise photos, and I added the year using Microsoft Digital Image Standard 2006.)
Paper and Ink Imaginings 