Dry Erase Calendar

It has been a while since I wrote a blog.  I have been really busy this fall preparing and leading one of the children's programs at my church among other things, that projects and blogs have been put on the back burner.  I'm hoping that will change now that things are starting to get back into the normal groove!

Many of you know that John has been on a few business trips this month, today he left for his third and final one for the month (potentially not for the year though! :( ).  Since they have been short trips, I haven't had a lot of time to work on any projects, but since it is Thanksgiving weekend and tomorrow is a holiday, I was able to get some "me" time and finish a project I started back in July.

For a while I have wanted to start planning our meals on a month-by-month basis.  Normally I prepare a meal plan on a bi-weekly basis, just writing it down on a pad of paper and putting it on the fridge.  I find that this takes a lot of work which started discouraging me from doing it, especially once we started redoing the main level (for all intense purposes, I basically stopped meal planning, which has lead to a lot of poor meals over the last few months...).  Finally at the end of June I decided that this was going to be something that I wanted to start over the summer.  Originally I had thought about just buying a dry erase calendar from Staples or some place like that, but then along came Pinterest and I discovered that I could MAKE a dry erase calendar which would look ten times nicer than a store bought one.  Over a few days, I started looked at different dry erase calendars on Pinterest, eventually I decided on this one: http://lifeasyouliveit.blogspot.ca/2013/05/diy-dry-erase-paint-chip-calendar.html and used it as my base.

To make the calendar, you need to get a picture frame, bristol board and 35 paint chips in 7 different colours.  I picked up the picture frame and bristol board at the end of the end of July. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get the paint chips because Wal-Mart didn't have any one coloured paint chips, only the ones with 5 colours, which was not going to work.   So I wasn't really able to start working on it, other than cutting the bristol board to size.

Now, while I was in Wal-Mart, checking the blog I had found, I decided that I would do a size smaller than what the woman who wrote the blog had bought.  I would suggest going with her 22"x28" versus my 20"x24", I thought that the larger one was just too large and that the one I bought would be more than large enough...however I regret it because those few inches actually make a huge difference.  It just means that my calendar is a bit tighter than I would like, but it should still work.

I also decided that bristol board was a better way to go than to paint the picture that was inside the frame.  I began to do that, but it was going to take many coats and made the paper funky.  Since bristol board is a $1, I figured that it was worth the money over the hassle it would be paint.

Onto the paint chips.  The original ones I started off with went from white to a pastel green, however after cutting them and putting them down, I realized (with some comments from John) that they really were not the best colours.  See...

Not all the colours, but the others were literally white or off
white.  I don't know what I was thinking when I picked them out....

Clearly, the effect I had wanted was not coming across with those colours.  Thankfully, John and I went out and got some new colours, which turned out much better since I had someone there to give me some feedback.  I came away with a rainbow of colours.

It took a while to get into gluing the pieces down.  I tried one weekend when John was away in September, all I was able to do was the two bottom corners and then I wasn't able to measure out the rest so that there would be an even distance between each paint chip...I'm not very good with numbers or equations etc.  It took a while, but I was able to get John to show me how to glue them down last weekend before he left for his second business trip.  He actually did the whole bottom row for me and from there I was able to finish the rest.  Here are some pictures of the progress.

Once I got that together, I used a longer paint chip for the month and I printed off the days of the week to glue over top of each column.  Here is the final product!

The plan is to get it up in the kitchen later this week once John is back and I'm going to start using for November.  Hopefully this will help me organize our meals a bit better!