mom's calendar

Allow me to whine a little. It has taken me all morning to load these 12 pictures. Our new camera takes these gigantic mega-pixel shots, then I have to figure out how to shrink them down before blogger will upload them. And then, it would only let me load two at a time. It's so irritating.

Thank you.

And now, sit back and enjoy the show. This is a 12 x 12" calendar. The collages I did online at Costco. They are 8 x 12" which left me with 4 inches to mess around with. On some pages 4 inches seemed like an awful lot. On others, it was just right. I got this calendar at Tuesday Morning for cheap. It's from Heidi Swapp and has page protectors for the decorated side. I like that. Because, even though this is a calendar, it's really a scrapbook of our lives from the previous year. So you might as well protect the pages. What I did not like, however, was that the days of the week went Monday - Sunday. Who in their right mind designs a calendar where the week begins on a Monday? I thought it was insane, and I knew it would drive my mother to the looney bin, so thus, the border strip with the die cuts for the correctly ordered days of the week. It adds an extra touch of cuteness.

OK - here we go. January. . . this is Mom and Dad as snow people. Got that new snowflake border punch for 60% off after Christmas.

February is my favorite. I love the love diecut and the papers are my fav. I hand cut the hearts out of chipboard and covered them with paper.

March is probably my least favorite. But it works. And the picture of 505 in the tulip field is old. Oh well.

April took a really long time. I punched all the squares (from scraps!) and inked them and made them into a little paper quilt.

May turned out dainty and pretty with all the paper hydrangeas.

June is a big birthday month for our family, so I went with the cupcake theme. I also happened to have a lot of pictures of the kids eating cupcakes for Darick's birthday last year. The papers were some I won from Lisa Dickenson's blog giveaway! I love the corals and browns together.

July allowed me to use up these fireworks stickers that I've had forever. I like the stars.

August really threw me for a loop. It was the last month I did and I was completely out of ideas by that point. Then I thought about the play structure in my parents' yard and whipped up a DIY swingset. I also made the smallest paper roses ever.

September. . . back to school. Easy.

I had envisioned lots of pictures of the kids in their Halloween costumes for October, but my peeps let me down. So they get one teeny-tiny picture of kids in costumes and then pics of me and the 505 on our date to the pumpkin patch from two or three years ago. Hey, you gotta do what you gotta do.

I went with circles for November and then realized I could cricut out these little tiny leaves to fit inside. I used pop dots on some of them for extra dimension.

Diagonals for December. Used up more scraps for this one.

And just in case you're wondering, Mom got her calendar on Wednesday of this week. Don't judge me.