Calendar Journal

I finally got around to making one of those calendar journals I've been seeing online.I've been waiting to find the perfect box to put it in, but when I found this plain white one for free, I decided I would try to make it work. I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out.

The concept for the journal is that you have a piece of paper for each day of the year, and each day you write down something you did that day or a funny thing that happened or anything significant really, and you write down what year it was. Then you reuse the calendar each year and are able to look back at what you did on that day in the past. 

Here's how I did it. 

I started with this plain white box I found for free. It's a recipe box and I think those work perfectly for this project but If you can find any small box those work well too.I may paint this or find some stickers eventually to make it look better.

Most of the paper I used for the cards inside was from this colorful card stock. I thought about using plain note cards, or even colorful ones to make it easier, and you could, but I wanted to do something different. I decided to make it look like I found a random scrap of paper, jotted down the memory and the date and threw it in the box. So, my papers are all different sizes and shapes. I used envelopes, printer paper, guest checks, journal paper, old cards, and anything I could find. It made it a longer process but I love how it turned out. 

Corey always has a lot of guest checks left over from work, and it was really easy to get the right shape and size I wanted from them without doing a lot of measuring and folding. They are also lined which I like and aren't too flimsy. Also, I knew I needed 365 little pages, so I thought it would be okay to have 60 or so of the same kind. 

I just simply cut off the parts that already had writing....

And this is the little paper I put into my journal. 

Obviously you can fold any kind of paper anyway you want and cut it to get several  papers to add inside.

I also did throw in about 80 note cards to speed up the process.  

Finally, this is what all the scraps of paper looked like together. 365! 

Next, I had to make the pages that would separate each month. I took an old planner and used the  calendar pages from last year. Obviously you could also stamp your months on or write them in or even use magazine letters, I just really loved how these pages matched the card stock I had. 

see how bright and colorful the months are in this planner! 

I made 12 card stock pages that were all the same size but a little bit bigger than the rest of the pieces in the box so that they would be visible above them. I used 3 colors and made 4 pages of each color. 

Next I cut off the month from each calender page in the planner. (from 2011) 

Finally I had a stack of colored papers to use as dividers and I had each of the months I needed to label them. 

I glued the months onto the top left of each page, and alternated the color of card stock I was using. I love how colorful it looks! 

To find the right placement for each divider I place January in the front , then counted out the number of pages behind it to match the number of days in January. Once I had that many pages, I placed the divider for February behind it. This is how the calendar looked when it was finished. 

The final step was to go through each month and write the date on the top left. (Here I wrote 6/17)  This was the card from the day before I made the calendar so I decided to fill it out as an example. I wrote the year, 2012, and then a message about what was significant about that day. "Took Jones up Sugarloaf Mountain. "

I think eventually, I'll find a bigger, prettier box, so that I can add pictures. 

I decided I didn't want it to just be a plain box, so I added a quote to the top.