Clayson Calendar

I am an avid scrapbooker-(mostly digital now)- and for the last few years I have made my mother-in-law a calendar for Christmas. It is filled with her kids and grandkids and fun things we do throughout the year. So now that I have this blog I thought I would show you how it turned out this year. First things first: I use Adobe Photoshop Elements 9. I love it, but there are a lot of different scrapbooking programs you can use. Assuming you have a program, you would need: Digital kits that are all over the web-, my favorite designers are Katie Castillo and Kristin Aagard. You will also need a digital calendar grid. You can also purchase these from designers on the web or you could make your own like I did. (Actually, my mom made them for me in Photoshop). Maybe I will do a post about how to do this later. Here are my pages that I did this year:

January

Jeremy’s brother Aaron and his family are in January.

February:

A picture of all the grandkids.

March:

 

My mother-in-law turned 60 in March so I put pictures of her party in March.

April:

My sister-in-law and her family in April.

May:

My family is in May.

June:

Jeremy’s sister and her family in June.

July:

Random family pictures in July.

August:

Random family pictures in August.

September:

Jeremy’s brother and his family in September.

October:

Random family pictures in October.

November:

Jeremy’s brother and his family in November.

December:

Our family picture in December.

The cover page:

Fun family pictures for the cover page.

This calendar is a 12 x 24.5. So I do the picture pages first and make the canvas size 12 x 12.5 to leave a small space for the binding. I leave the calendar part a 12 x 12 canvas. When I am ready to put them together I make the canvas 12 x 24.5 and drag my pages onto it in my photoshop program. For all the birthdays I find little birthday cake elements, and for the anniversarys I have used a diamond wedding ring. I use a lot of Word Art- which mostly comes from the web. My favorite to use is Bethany Harty at Elegant Word Art. She has a store and she also gives out freebies every day. Love her stuff.  I also mark all the holidays with some kind of element that fits the holiday. We get these printed at a place called Scrapping Simply in Salt Lake. The quality is super good and we have been pleased with them. Well there you have it! My first post on my Creative Blog. This calendar is really fun to do and by the end of the year my mother-in-law has a binder full of memories from the year.

Creating

I am so excited to be starting this new blog! I have been thinking about it for a long time and I have been wanting to “do” something for a long time. I love to create things. Anything that makes me smile is worth doing, Some things don’t make me smile until they are finished, but they are still worth doing. My sister-in-law and my sister introduced me to Pinterest. Now, it has probably been around a while, but in most things in life I am almost always the last to know about anything! Haha! This is such a FUN site. It really got me interested in many different things. It made me want to learn new things, and it helped me to find fun things to do with my children. I LOVE to learn new things and there are people out there who are so clever with the things they come up with. Hopefully as I get this blog rolling I can inspire someone out there to create something that makes them happy.

Creating can come from anywhere and be interpreted in many ways. So on this journey, (since sometimes my thoughts are racing from one thing to the next) I am sure you will see that creating something and inspiration can come from anywhere……..