I love calendar time! I hate calendar time!
I love calendar time because my calendars are fabulous and marvelously fun to make. I also love calendar time because I love love love a new year. It’s the big annual mulligan for the year before. But I hate calendar time because I’m always behind as it is, and designing and mass-producing a handfinished product always kills me. Of course, my version of mass production is only a couple hundred.
This year, every single cover is different (hand-cut from old 50s and 60s year books), and besides matting (read: placing atop a slightly larger paper cutout; nothing dramatic and professional) them all, I’m also laminating them all, because the hand-applied cutouts can get a little fragile over time. But I need to keep the edges all orderly and clean so they can be bound properly. So laminating also means trimming and trimming and trimming and relaminating and relaminating and relaminating. As much as I love spending my afternoons shaving off hairline curls of plastic with a razor blade… you know.
2009 is The Year of the Dreamer. And the old yearbook pictures are so much fun! This year, people can order a surprise, or they can ask for a general category. Really, you could ask after something really specific, but it’s a crapshoot whether I’ll actually have it. There are class photo grids and group pictures from grade school to high school, extra-curricular clubs, various sports, classroom scenes, senior portraits! Many of the 60s yearbook candid shots have corny captions, about what you’d expect from a 1960s yearbook staffer.
Specifically, there are (many only have one in each category): cheerleading, drill team, pep squad, marching band, twirlers, orchestra, drum majors, classrooms, swim team, tennis, football, basketball, school dances, grades K – 12, groups of prissy girls, groups of dapper young men, queens, bowling club, class officers, school dances, baseball, cafeteria and snack bar ladies, groups of little children in freaking adorable 50s outfits, goody-goody 50s hair (boys and girls), and lots and lots of poufy Aqua-Netted 60s girls’ hairdos.
If you haven’t seen my calendars before, each year a choose a theme, and they include pictures to color, grown-up activities, and weekly and monthly engagement calendars. I try to use salvaged or recycled materials & they’re all hand-finished. This year, in addition to the one of a kind, fancy laminated covers, I’m also making pockets out of the glossy color pages of old wall and engagement calendars I’ve been hoarding for theoretical future craftiness. One of the calendars I’m using was from 1997! My birthday was marked “27 years old, and what have you done?” Sigh. Back when 27 seemed an advanced age. Oh! And they come with a little package of colored pencils!
Here are some more of this year’s covers:
P.S. They’re for sale here (the photos on the store page are from last year–I’ll be adding pictures of the 2009 finished product this weekend).