Crafting Calendars: Part One: The Snags.

One of the first craft ideas in my DIY Bride Crafty Countdown book is a calendar for bridesmaids. I loved the idea. I love calendars and lists! I'd been planning an evening get together with my girls and wanted to make them each a calendar and contact sheets to take home. An organized wedding party is at least a slightly less stressed wedding party.

This was meant to be a fun Friday evening de-stress kind of project to ease me into the bigger and better wedding projects to come. Unfortunately the craft gods were not smiling on me for this one. Maybe the word processing/printer gods were the ones not smiling...either way someone had their undies in a bunch. This project is supposed to take an hour, mine took about 8hrs spread over two days. Don't misunderstand it was a lovely project and I'm glad I did it they come out great. I just thought the amount of to-do was comical in the end.

The book recommends using Microsoft Office to make the calendars. I didn't have that so I was using a free download, word processing program I got from the internet. Hitch number one: I had to find and download a calendar template. Hitch number two: It only worked in their spread sheet program. Spreadsheets don't often allow for cute, have you noticed? I made a month in the spreadsheet program copied it and pasted into a document. It was time consuming and (Surprise!)not so pretty in the end.

Then I upgraded to Microsoft Office. This made life easier for a while because the calendar template was built in. Hitch three: Getting the pages to print correctly. The pages are 4x9 so I wanted two pages to print on each sheet. Mike and I racked our brains and wasted paper. We never got it right with Word and had to switch to Publisher. That's right girlies I started from scratch three separate times so excuse the typos because I'm not re-typing squat.

Before I made my second attempt in Microsoft Office we were having printer issues. Hitch number three: we needed ink. I volunteered to run out for some, but Mike insisted on cleaning the printer first and broke it. You'd think after doing IT for so long that wouldn't happen. Then again maybe he just told me it was broken to get a new one...hmm... Hitch number four: broken printer. I ended up buying a new one because we're going to be doing a lot of printing. Not just silly crafts, but lots of other stuff for the wedding and my family's onslaught of birthdays.

After all was said and done we had everything we needed to get these done, but I was too tired to try until the next day. See my next post for instructions and pictures of the finished product.