perpetual calendar

You may remember me saying that I have a hard time resisting fabric when it's on clearance.  Well, before I got back into sewing, I was even worse about scrapbook paper on clearance.  Hobby Lobby certainly didn't help things; they used to put a huge rack of single sheets in the clearance section and price them ten for a dollar.  Enable much??

Anyway, I had this cool double frame I got at Target a few years ago.  And it was clearance-priced.  But you already guessed that.  Sigh.

And it was a really cool frame.  The individual frames flipped around so you could put another photo on the back.  But I got bored with it.  So when I saw this perpetual calendar idea on {Pressed Down, Shaken Together}, I decided to give it a go and maybe put a dent in my scrapbook paper stash while I was at it.

First, I popped the smaller frames out of the big frame.  This of course left holes in the larger frame, but they weren't that noticeable.  Maybe if I had had some kind of filler or wood putty on hand, I would have done something about it, but I honestly didn't mind.  I figured once I was done, those holes would be hidden or at least not glaringly obvious (spoiler alert...I was right!).

I decided that since I was using a rectangular frame, I would make two sets of cards; one for the days of the week, and one for the actual number dates.  And since my frame was pretty thick, I didn't worry about making the cards double-sided like in the original tutorial since I knew there would be enough room.  The author of the tutorial also had the great idea to use snapshots and cool embellishments to make the calendar really meaningful and personal, but in order to keep this project as cheap as possible, I decided to rely on the pretty, eye-catching patterns of my paper instead.

So last Friday night I got to work.  What Women Want was on TV, and by the time the movie was over, I had this to show for my night:

Really I just found a cute font in Word that I liked, increased the size to about 300, and then printed out the outlines of the numbers 0 to 9.  I cut them out and used them as stencils for each card.  This is the creativity you have to resort to when you don't have a fancy cutting machine.  But I digress.

Then yesterday I did the days of the week set.

There you go.  Not one card is the same paper.  Really.  I checked!  Anyway, I already had some neutral colored cardstock from another project so I just cut squares that were a little bigger than the scrapbook paper squares.  That way the cards wouldn't be as flimsy and would flip better.  I mounted the scrapbook paper squares onto the cardstock squares with scrapbook adhesive squares (best stuff EVER), punched two holes in all of them, and then got ready to put everything on the frame.

The original tutorial uses twine to loop everything together, but I decided to try cable ties first.  I found some in black to match my frame, and made sure they were long enough to go through everything.  I probably would have used twine or something else if I hadn't kept my frame black, since it's hard to make cable ties look attractive unless they match your frame!  I tried to make everything as even as possible, so if it's a little crooked hopefully it's not that noticeable!

Not too bad, huh?  I did have a panicky moment when the cards got hung up on the end of the cable tie when I tried to flip them, but after I worked the whole loop around a little, everything laid flat (kind of like when your paper gets hung up in a spiral notebook but once you mess with the spiral a little it's fine....or maybe that just happens to me).  So now I have a calendar that works for any month of the year.

Ta-da!  I like how it looks on top of our desk.

And each new day, you just flip to the next card!  Here's another outside shot, since my house and camera both make for insanely dark photos.

And the grand total for this project is.....88 cents for the cable ties.  And it was a pack of 20 so I have most of them left for...oh I don't know, maybe actually tying cords and cables together as nature intended?  I had the frame, paper, markers, and scrapbook adhesive squares on hand already so there was nothing else out of pocket.  LOVE IT.

Linked up to Creations by Kara and A Little Tipsy!