Sweet Shoppe Designs – The Sweetest Digital Scrapbooking Site on the Web

Hi everyone! 🙂 It’s Ange, I’m the lucky one with “Turn it Off Tuesday” this week.  Not because Christy and Paula are out of ideas (far from it!), but I said “Hey I have a project that would work this week”, and truthfully I so rarely “turn it off” and make something non digital, I thought I’d better raise my hand to do this at least once!

My project begins with making some Calendars for family members this Christmas.  I had the calendars done and I wasn’t sure how to bind them, or if I even wanted them bound… overall I wasn’t sure how to display them.   So I drug out some old clipboards we had and decided to dress up the clipboards a little as a fun way to display the calendar pages on.

When I first had this idea, I thought “Oh, I can really make the clipboards so cute and fun”, but once I started with just a base paper and a small accent or two, I realized that I wanted the calendar pages to be the main focus of this project, and I didn’t want the clipboard competing with them, so I kept the clipboards simple. Here’s what I did.  I cut a 12 by 12 paper to the right size to mod podge down on to the clipboard.  Before mod podging it, I inked the edges of the paper.  I read a tip once somewhere that getting the paper wet helped to prevent bubbles in the final project and that really worked well to keep the bubbles from showing up once the mod podge came into the picture.

The flower on the top isn’t glued down, it’s a silk flower with the stem cut off, glued onto a magnet.  I wasn’t sure if everyone would want a “big old flower” on the top of their clipboard, so if they don’t like it there, they can use it as a magnet on their fridge or something.

The last thing I did was to tie a pen onto the clipboard with a ribbon. I actually hot glued the ribbon to the pen to help keep it attached.  The Calendar shown above is from Robin and Christy and is available at the Sweet Shoppe and the background paper is part of the collection I had printed with Carolees Ceations earlier this year.
My family loved their calendars and thier clipboards (they got them last week at a family Christmas party), and I hope if you are giving a calendar this year and you’ve been wondering how to bind it or present it that this gives you a new idea! 🙂