I come from a big family – 8 kids (including myself), most of us are married and have kids too. There are 20 grandchildren in our family. Altogether there are 36 of us when we get together to celebrate holidays. It can be complete chaos with that many people in one house at a time, but I wouldn’t have it any other way!
This year for Christmas I decided I was going to create a calendar for each of my siblings and my parents. I thought it would be cool to personalize each calendar by using mainly pictures of each sibling’s family, so they could have a good start to a family album when the year is over with their page prints from the calendar, but I also wanted to capture our entire families’ important dates on everyone’s calendars.
Now let me tell you, it took me a while to enter birthdays and anniversaries of all 36 family members as well as national holidays and I knew I did not want to have to do this 9 times! Thankfully I thought of this in advance, so decided to complete each months grid’s with the holidays, birthdays and anniversaries I wanted to include. I used embellishments from a variety of packages to mark each special day as well as text to state the event taking place that day. Once I completed this for each month, I saved the calendar as “Von Holtum Calendar”. This now serves as my 2010 calendar template from which I have started all other projects from because the grid is already done. Here is a sample page from the calendar I created for myself.
For each calendar that I want to work on for my siblings now, I just start with my "Von Holtum Calendar" template and complete the pages. When I am ready to save my progress on that calendar, I do a “save as” and assign that project a new name. This has saved me a lot of time and I am thankful I have not had to create 9 of the same calendar grids!
I do have one caution to add to this and that is if you plan to change a page to a different template. Unfortunately selecting the “change page” option in the software will wipe out the entire page – including the calendar grid. If at all possible, set your calendar up with the pages you want to use first and then complete your grid to save your template. If you decide to change the page after the grid is designed you can also open a new project and design your page print, then copy it into your calendar (the directions for this are noted in Corinne’s posting from 10/13 - Calendar Templates: Defining your time).
Happy Holidays and Happy Calendar Making!