Homemade Gifts: Calendars

As the end of the year approaches, most of us start thinking of gifts that we would like to give. Personally, I love homemade gifts, but I always seem to dream them up in December and then stress through the holiday season trying to get them done in time to give out for Christmas. This year, I’m starting early and using my digital scrapbooking supplies to speed up the process a bit.

I wanted to make a desk calendar for myself and thought they would make easy “token gifts” for acquaintances and church friends. I searched through the Calendars section in the Scrap Girls Boutique and found several calendar templates that I liked. The ones that really appealed to me were released several years ago, so there wasn’t a “2014” – but I can fix that! Photoshop makes it easy to edit any calendar (even the ones that don’t say editable). Let me show you how!

ScrapSimple Calendar Templates: 4×6 Frames 2013 have a layer for the numbers and an editable layer for the year. To change the year, double-click on the T to temporarily activate the Text Tool, and type in 2014.

In 2014, January starts on a Wednesday. To fix the template, I searched through all of the templates until I found one with 31 days that started on Wednesday. It turned out to be May. I selected the “May_days” layer, right-clicked, and chose Duplicate Layer (placing it on the January calendar). You could also change the month to January and just use the May template.

ScrapSimple Embellishment Templates: 4×6 Bold Calendars comes with the numbers as separate layers. In this case, I placed the layer starting on Wednesday, aligned it with the original “Dates” layer, and turned off the original “Dates” layer by clicking on the eye icon.

In ScrapSimple Paper Templates: Editable Calendars, some calendars have numbers and some do not. Either way, find a calendar with individual dates and duplicate those layers onto your calendar file.

In your calendar file, unlink the number layers, if needed, and re-link the layers by column (a column for each day of the week). Then move the columns to the correct location.

Hopefully, this takes some of the stress out of the gift-giving season. As you pull together your homemade holiday gifts using your digital scrapbooking supplies, be sure to post them in the Scrap Girls Gallery for everyone to ooh and aah over.