Calendar 09

One of these days, I'm going to have to stop procrastinating.



Last year, I got the idea to do a family calendar late in the game. I ended up printing and binding the pages after the shop closed for Christmas Eve, mere hours before I had to be at family gatherings and whatnot.





So this year, I knew all year I planned to do another of these. It's a great way to share some of my excessive photography of my honyocks with the family.





So naturally I sorted keeper photos out as I downloaded them from my camera through the year. Researched who's birthdays were when and all that, right?



Except I didn't. I can't remember exactly when I started last year, but I might have gotten an even later start this year. Naturally, with less time to put it together, I decided to go with a more involved design, coming up with a color scheme for each month instead of having all the backgrounds the same.



And then the leather texture I applied to the victorian scroll motif, I can't let that be the same on all the pages, it'd look artificial. I know, it can't look anything but artificial, but when I go for organic textures, I like to try and make them as plausibly organic as possible.

All this for a background I'm getting ready to cover up with photos. I truly have rocks in my head.




And then the artist formerly known as Frau Lobster sent me a link to another web site listing obscure holidays, and then I thought to sprinkle in the occasional celebrity birthday.



Oh, and there was also the sifting through 17,697 photos I've taken in the past year and picking the cream of the crop.







And then picking the cream of that crop, balancing of course so that there are more or less equal numbers of pictures of each girl and trying to represent as many of the year's highlights as possible. Of course while trying to keep the photo over the month it was taken in. Meaning all my vacation pics from March, and there were 1020 of those, had to be culled for the handful that could actually ride over March.



Anyway, I have fun doing it, but I also put a lot of pressure on myself to make it perfect. I also test-printed the photos this year and tried my best to color correct them. Tricky thing, really, between the limitations of my pocket camera and the DocuColor.




So as I cut these down, punched them, drilled, coiled and wrapped them, I felt pretty good. I'd burned the midnight oil for five nights straight, finishing at 4:00 am the night of the 23rd, printing them starting at Noon on Christmas Eve. But I was proud of the result.



Then I get home, start showing Em the one I made to keep in our kitchen, and I hear her scream.

You put Horatio Alger's birthday on the 13th but FORGOT MINE???



I swear I had her birthday on there. I don't know where the hell it went off to, but I do know I'm never going to live this one down.



My first thought was to hand-write it on the ones I was giving out in Sharpie, but that's so cheesy. So I went ahead and gave the calendars and then, today after work, printed some transparent labels to fix the errata. It's not quite perfect, but it doesn't jump out at you like a twelve year old who's Father remembered to put Ozzy Osbourne's birthday on the family calendar while forgetting his first born.