It’s time to get back to school! You know what that means, right? No more sleeping in and taking the days as they come. It’s time to get back into a schedule and a rhythm. For many families it’s hard to keep track of everybody’s activities, with children running here and there for sports events, den meetings and piano lessons. Why not bring the family together on a project that will help coordinate everyone?
Take a trip to your favorite office supply store for a wall or desk calendar with large boxes for each day of the month. I found the least expensive of the Staples calendars to have the most space for what I wanted to do, especially because its pages follow the school year rather than the calendar year. These calendar pages make great canvases for your stamping and sticker art.
Assemble your supplies: scissors, craft knife, mounting squares, inks, stamps, stickers, crayons, colored pencils, glitter, and any other embellishments you’d like. Flat items work best since the calendar pages lay atop one another and you’ll probably be writing in your day-to-day activities. Don’t forget to use the new school year calendar as a reference, as well as last year’s calendar where you’ve already marked important dates you want to carry over to this year.
Go to town with your supplies! Highlight birthdays with lots of balloons and stars. Create a countdown for a trip to the zoo with colorful animal stickers. Make a date for a Family Day and decorate that square with appropriate images, such as shoes and purses for a mother-daughter shopping spree. Mark off the holidays that are important to your family.
Some months can be decorated with a theme or a color scheme, as December is shown here. Rollagraph stamps work wonders for filling in space quickly and effectively. Use light colors on background images so anything written over the stamped image will be legible.
Alphabet stickers are great for sayings, names and important events. Use big chunky stamps so even the little ones in your family can get in on the act and contribute their artwork to the family project.
On the May page, I used clear mailing labels to print out a riddle, one word to each label, and placed them on the page in a whimsical manner. Be sure to let the ink dry thoroughly on these labels before placing them. Boxes or "medallion" stickers are great for calling attention to events...simply write in the event name, place and time right on the sticker, and it will stand out.
After your calendar is finished, hang it in a spot where the whole family will see it every day. Perhaps it can be the focus of your family communication center, where you might also hang a bulletin board and chalkboard for "inter-office" messages.
When creating your family masterpiece, here are some handy tips:
- Avoid bickering by giving each child a page to work on him/herself. When all pages are finished, staple or glue the tops of the pages back to the board they were torn from.
- Remember to give pages time to dry when using pigment inks and glitter glue. A sheet of waxed paper in between pages will help keep them from sticking while you are working on the rest of the calendar.
- Use flat embellishments to avoid bumps on calendar pages that will be on top, so they’ll have a smooth writing surface.
- Highlight birthdays, anniversaries, school plays, sports events, grandparent’s visits, Pizza Night, sleepover parties...pretty much anything!
- Stamping with dye ink goes quickly and easily and if you use stamps with large images and spaces, it allows for some nice spots for the younger kids to color!
- Summon the child in yourself and use crayons to write in birthdays and to mark other events.
- When the year is done, save the pages in an art portfolio as a record of the years events.
- Make an annual family event out of this project!
