braden pate

Two weeks ago, I was perusing one of my favorite blogs, Design*Sponge. I stumbled across this guide for a vintage postcard calendar journal. Check it out here. The idea is to create a calendar out of notecards on which you can write a simple memory from that day on every year. So in 3 years you would have 3 memories from each day and so on and so forth. It’s kind of like a physical twitter.

I knew immediately that I wanted to recreate this gem but with my own spin. I set out and gathered my supplies:

• A jumbo pack of 5x7 inch index cards
• A small box with lid and (25 sheets) flat paper cardstock I found at my local Paper Source
• Date stamper from Office Depot and ink pad
• Xacto knife & cutting board
• Markers & pens (color choice my own)

I do suggest Sharpie’s new non bleed pens, they are excellent. The hardest part of this project was cutting the index cards to fit in my box which turned out to be a little more than half of their original size. I then stamped each card with a date (just the month and day) which once you find a rhythm goes by fairly quickly (expect around an hour for a year).

Next I cut my flat card stock to be about an inch higher than the day cards and color coated them with three colors based on the weather of each season: Hot = Canary Yellow, Cold = Parrot Green, Moderate = Yellow-Green. I then embellished each month card with some nice cursive and expressive lettering. I also chose to do some simple line patterns on the exterior of the box to spruce it up a bit. After all is said and done, I placed the cards in the box and presto the Calendar Journal is created. Below are some photos of the finished product.

Twine: $1
Binder clips: $2
Metal pushpins: $3
Plus an assortment of collected photos, posters and personal projects and here you have an eclectic and cost effcective wall display.

Launching a new blog: http://www.idrawtype.tumblr.com

One index card. One sharpie pen. One quote, hand drawn, per day.

the entire 6th season of project runway is on hulu. this could be dangerous.

you can’t know the joy of getting up, until you fall down.