Friday, January 16, 2009

Fabric Birthday Calender

With only a few days left of my holiday, I started on some new projects last week. I browsed around blogland to get some inspiration and came upon a project to make a fabric calender on http://iheartlinen.blogspot.com/. What a great idea! Except I know myself. I will be too busy (or lazy?) to change the calender every month! So I decided to make a Birthday Calender instead. Last year I forgot a few important birthdays and although I have been forgiven since, I do not want this to happen again. So I altered the project to suit my needs.
I had several pieces of steel lying around for my long-planned Magnetic Notice Board, so I used a smaller piece for this calender. I basically made a "bag" to fit the steel in and rounded it off with bias binding. I used a dowel stick to hang it from.
The original tutorial had fabric covered buttons with velcro attached to the back and that would be attached to the velcro sewn onto the calender. I did not have enough velcro and decided to improvise. Since my backing was magnetic I used smaller magnets to attach the names, dates and months. To enable storage of the extra name tags, I decided not to attach the magnets to the back of each cardstock nametag. Instead I leave the magnets on the board and attached paperclips to each nametag. Works for me!
Afterwards I decided to add a pocket to store the rest of the nametags and month tags in. A closer view of the pocket I made. At this stage I could not sew it on, so I handstitched it on.
I also stamped the words "Happy Birthday" on calico and sewed that onto the pocket with some ribbon to embellish it. I placed the calender on my work desk so I can see it every day and I added birthdays up to March. It has already been useful with me not forgetting the first birthday of the year!

1 comment:

sewkalico said...

This is a lovely idea! Well done.

ps I see you've been camping (I imagine sometime when my boys are older I will have to do the same!)