Birthday Card Calendar

I give birthday cards to all of the people in my family and my husband's family, including in-laws, out-laws, nieces and nephews. That gets to be quite a few cards to keep track of (I think it is up to 54 now). I also like to make all my cards at the beginning of the year so that I can have a chance of sending all the cards on time. I needed a better way to store all my cards than in a box where I have to rifle through them every time I need to find a card, like I have done for the last several years. So this year I made a pocket calendar. I've seen binders that have pockets for each month, but I didn't want something separate from a calendar. I wanted to be able to hang it on my wall in the same place I always hang my calendar and to be able to pull my cards right from it as soon as I see on the calendar that a birthday is coming up.

In order to make pockets that the cards would not fall out of when hanging upside down waiting for their month to show up, I used some gallon sized zipper bags and large sheets of scrapbook paper. I laid a bag on top of a piece of paper, folding the bottom of the bag underneath so that it would fit better on the paper and leave enough room on the bottom for punching holes later.

Then I laid a second piece of paper on top of the back with about and inch or so hanging off the bottom. Then I flipped the whole thing over and folded the overhanging part of the second piece of paper over the bottom of the first paper and glued the flap down.

Next I flipped everything back over and squeezed a line of glue along each side of the bag making sure it was a little gloppy so that it would spread a touch when I pressed the top paper down on top of it. This way I only had to use one line of glue to glue the bag and the top paper to the bottom sheet.

So now I had a pocket that would zip closed and keep all the cards inside when turned upside down.

And then I decorated each pocket as I saw fit. To reinforce the sides, I either added a couple of eyelets on the side (with this great tool my sister gave me for Christmas that maybe I'll post about later) or I put in a staple. On the pockets that I put a staple on, I made sure to lay a piece of ribbon down before I stapled and then tied it in a cute bow or knot so that the staple didn't show.

I cut apart an old 3-ring binder and covered the rings section with fabric and ribbon. I used a 1" sized notebook, but to do it again, I think I would try to go a little bit bigger. Then I punched holes in the bottom of each pocket page, stuck a calendar page on the back of each of them (except January--and I had to add an extra pocket-less page for December's calendar) and stuck the thing on the wall. After I put all the cards inside the pockets, the whole thing got a tad bulky and was definitely too heavy to hang by the holes punched in the tops of the pages, which I had anticipated. That is why I used a binder instead of just metal rings or ribbons to tie all the pages together.

I mounted the rings on the wall and then put a nail up above it just to hold the pages up. By doing this, the papers hold only the weight of themselves individually instead of collectively and thusly stay intact.