Personalize your Calendars

I’ve been making calendars for my family for a long time now. It started when we lived overseas and the Grandmas missed the growing years of our young children, so a personalized calendar was just what they needed to keep up to date. This was long before I knew about scrapbooking, and long before digital photography, the internet and photo-sharing were around.

I would laboriously draw up calendars by hand in a book of quality watercolor paper and get the children to draw on it or for it – depending how old they were at the time. Actually I really enjoyed doing it. The hard part was engendering enthusiasm in the children because I’d left it so late to do it all and everything had to be done in about a week or it missed the last mailing date to arrive in time for Christmas.

We included photos of the birthday girl/boy in the various birthday months which helped stretch things and reduce the number of drawings needed that first year … which was just as well for enthusiasm waned very quickly. Up to that point I’d have said my children loved drawing and were always doing it, but when even a loved task is condensed into a very short period it can become a drag.

As I’ve told you often, I’m a ‘last-minute’ person and the children quickly got bored as I tried to get them to do too much in too short a time, so after that first year it quickly became seasonal photographs showing things we’d done throughout the year to fill the calendar instead of drawings. There might be the occasional drawing or a little story to fill in – almost scrapbooking, but not quite!

Now if I’d been an organized person, I’d have arranged this over the year and it wouldn’t have been so hard for the children, or I could have gathered and saved the drawings they’d made throughout the year.

Of course, it is a lot easier nowadays with digital cameras. You can photograph the children’s drawings while they are still fresh and not worry about storing them until they become brittle and start to disintegrate. And if you make a scrapbook layout while everything is still fresh in your mind you have a long-term record of your genius’ creativity. Then all you have to do is re-size the image to just what you need for this year’s calendar!

But in those days it took too long to go through the processing cycle and I didn’t have time for that.

I still make calendars even although that early reason has gone. I enjoy doing it and it continued to be a way to show the Grandmas what the children have been up to – even as young adults! The styles varied but they were usually photograph based.

And now there are digital scrapbooking kits especially for making calendars!

Digital Calendar Templates

The one used here is Trish Yochum’s digital scrapbooking kit: Frilly Calendar.

I was amazed and thrilled at how quickly it all came together. As I’m not very experienced I took the simplest path of leaving the flowers black/white/gray (as in January at the top), or using the overlay blending option as below. Doing this changes them from the template non-color, to a shade of your background color giving you a tone-on-tone effect.

(If you know your photo-editing program better than I do, you can be a lot more creative with the elements in the template, lol!)

Here are some examples.

Products used in examples:

His and Hers Paper Biggie from Scrap Girls

ScrapSimple Digital Layout Album Templates – Layered: 4×6 2009 Frilly Calendar

This inexpensive acrylic photo frame from Ikea works really well with this template. It’s just a few dollars, so shouldn’t break the bank, and is a great Christmas gift idea.

There are six ‘frames’ with a gray border and clear viewing area; two photos fit snuggly into each, back to back. Flip over the months as they change.

There is a little lost at the edges of the photos, but not much.

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Here are examples in the frame:

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Simple to use

I like simple scrapbooking ideas and this template allows me to make quick and simple scrapbook pages that become great gifts.

I was delighted with how easy it was to use these templates – the flowers and photo masks just slotted into place as I slide each across to my working document. I didn’t even have to jiggle anything to get it into the right place.

No one will know you’re new to digital scrapbooking if you make personalized calendars with a digital scrapbooking kit like this great digital calendar templates for Christmas gifts

Related posts:

1. Calendars: Family History in the Making
2. Super Fast Christmas Gift Idea
3. Using Melissa Renfro’s Perpetual Calendar
4. Scrapbook Calendar: February 2011
5. Scrapbook Layout: Christmas Dreaming

Tagged as: calendars, Christmas, digital, digital supplies, scrapbooking kits