Perpetual Calendar Makeover

I have all sorts of good intentions to blog more frequently, but I'm having a little trouble making good on them. A large reason for that is that my laptop died over Christmas, so I am working on my very old and v.e.r.y. s.l.o.w. little netbook that Collin kept for recording research out in the field. All my rescued files, including quiet book photos, are on an external hard drive, and it's a huge hassle to try to pull together blog posts in this situation. I hope before too long I'll be able to get back to a regular schedule, but in the mean time, here's a fun little project I finished a week ago.

I found this perpetual calendar at a thrift store for two dollars, and knew right away that it would be a fun addition to the school room. I remember exactly the day I bought it - it was November 1st. It's easy to remember, because the two tiles that were missing were October and 31. Since the calendar was set up for November, I wondered if the store volunteers had just set the calendar out that morning, or what the story was. Anyway, for $2 I figured I could probably figure out something that would work.

For two months it hung in our school room, looking kind of sad and dated, but full of potential. Finally, I decided to take the plunge and give it a makeover. I'm so glad I did - check out how it looks now:

How do you update a vintage wooden calendar? You put a bird on it! The whole makeover was surprisingly easy. Collin cut me eight new square tiles for holidays and the missing 31, as well as a piece for the decorative picture holding slot. I cut the bird picture out of a calendar from last year. The flip side of the picture board has another picture from the calendar - a large colorful butterfly - but the bird side turned out better so it will likely just stay that way.

I refreshed the grimy beige tiles by printing new dates onto white cardstock, gluing the cardstock squares to the wooden tiles with tacky glue, and spraying them with Rust-Oleum Crystal Clear Enamel. If I were to do it again, I think I would use rubber cement to secure the cardstock to the wooden tiles, since the tacky glue doesn't clean off the paper if you get an accidental smear on it. The clear gloss coat was the trickiest part of the project, since we don't have a garage and it's far too cold to spray outside. I ended up spraying them inside and smelling the fumes throughout the downstairs all night, which isn't really something I recommend. Spray paint projects really do belong to the summer.

The longest part of this project was deciding which holidays to include and finding little icons to represent each day. I began by listing all the holidays I wanted to include, and dividing them by whether they fell on the same date every year or moved around. Holidays with fixed dates get a holiday icon fixed to the back of the  date tile, so when their month comes around I only have to flip the tile over to display the holiday instead of the date. I was surprised that the only duplicate holiday date was February 14 (Valentine's Day) and June 14 (our anniversary). Happily, those can both be very well represented with a heart! 

The other holidays I included were:

1 January: New Year's Day

2 February: Groundhog's Day

4 July: Independence Day

6 January: Epiphany

8 September: Annie's birthday. So far September is the only month of the year we have two birthdays in our family, and since the 8th isn't another holiday Annie gets to have her birthday permanently on the back of the 8 tile.

12 February: Lincoln's birthday. Instead of President's Day, a moveable holiday, I decided to put both Lincoln's and Washington's birthdays on their actual days, and then to figure out Presiden'ts day from there. I did this both because I didn't really want to dedicate one of my moveable tiles to President's Day, and because Holiday Inn was on my mind as I made this calendar and in that movie both Lincoln's and Washington's birthdays are celebrated, as in the old style before the two holidays got smashed together.

14 February and 14 June: Valentine's day and our wedding anniversary. Also Flag Day, but our anniversary trumped that holiday.

17 March: St. Patrick's Day

22 February: Washington's Birthday. President's Day is always the third Monday in February, which I think is also the Monday in between Lincoln's and Washington's birthdays.

25 December: Christmas!

31 October: Halloween.

The moveable holidays I included are: Good Friday, Easter, Pentecost, Thanksgiving, Daylight savings both spring and fall, Mother's Day, Father's Day, Back to School, School holiday, Birthday, Season changing (for all exuinox and solstice dates), an American flag for Memorial Day, Veteran's Day, Pearl Harbor Day, or any other time we're feeling patriotic, and Labor Day. I realize I had to leave out a number including Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Columbus Day, and National Cheese Appreciation Day, but I'm pretty happy with the list.

I painted the calendar with bright cherry red latex enamel paint. I didn't prime it so it wouldn't be quite as intense as if I was painting on top of white, and the color is just about perfect. Before painting, I traced over the days of the week with a ball point pen to create enough indentation in the wood that I could paint new letters on top. It worked pretty well, especially together with the fact that the original letters showed through the fresh paint a tiny bit. 

I painted the letters back on with white fingernail polish. It worked really well, except I was a little impatient and painted before the red was fully cured. The white mixed with the red just enough to make the pink noticeable against the fresh white paper of the tiles. Oh well.

And just for fun, here's a before and after comparison photo. Granted, I snapped the first picture at night, so the colors are off a bit, but the dinginess is pretty accurate. You'll notice that I took down the extra month tiles and replaced them with new holiday squares. That's because the months are narrower than the date tiles, and prone to falling off at the slightest bump. That's why they were rubber banded together in the first picture. Now the extra tiles live in my desk drawer, and the calendar looks much better for it.

This was a fun little project, since it actually took less time than than I thought it might. I finished the whole thing in about four days, which was dramatically better than the colored crate shelving I'd just finished the week before that took over a month to complete. One more project checked off my list, and one step closer to finishing the school room!

Color in the School Room

For the last few months, one of my biggest house projects has been the school room. Our house is a cross-gable with a very straightforward layout: living room in the front, dining room and school room in the middle, and kitchen in the back. So the school room (or back parlor, downstairs bedroom, and playroom as I'm sure it's been over the course of its long life) is very central in the house. But when we moved in, it was a dumping ground for unpacked boxes and unfinished projects. I had a vision for what I wanted it to become, but it was going to take a lot of work and a lot of paint before we got there.

Before I show you the school room, a quick note about color. I love color. Really, really love color. Working with and looking at color is one of the main reasons I knit, spin, weave, and sew, even more than the final product or the process of creating. And color is one of the three main ways (along with reading seed catalogs and looking at green plants) that I intentionally fight off the winter blues. Since the school room was going to be one of the most colorful rooms in the house, I picked it for my big project this winter.

This is a snapshot of my schoolroom pinboard. I knew I wanted a lot of color, antique school desks and a real antique slate chalkboard. But what I started with was a lot of brown.

I don't have any good before pictures to show you of the school room, except this one that we took on our first showing of the house last March. The previous owners weren't doing very much with the room besides keeping some of their kids toys out of the general path of the house. The window in this picture is the only one in the room, so it's the darkest room in the house.

The first thing we did was paint (and when I say we, I really mean my very kind mother-in-law who came up for a few days  before we moved and painted two rooms for us) the room a very light salmon. The previous color was more of a light yellow/tan, and was not a bad color except it added to the overall brown of the room. Brown floor, brown trim, yellow curtains, yellow walls, tan ceiling. My vision was bright, warm, and colorful, so I picked out a color called "pink sangria." I had lots of second and third thoughts about the color, but now that I'm starting to get the furniture and accessories the way I envisioned, I love it. It's light enough to be almost a neutral, but warmer and more interesting than the rental white we'd been living in for five years.

This picture shows (a) the room color most accurately of all the photos in this post, (b) the beautiful (and heavy!) antique slate chalkboard I bought from a lovely woman on Craigslist, and (c) our main project this week: potty training Laurel. Who has recently started asking us to call her Laurie. She's my hilariously funny girl, and a delight to have in the house.

Here is my desk and work corner of the school room. There are so many things I love about this area! I love the enamel topped farm table that has a new life as my desk. It works so well for all the sewing, cutting, designing, laying out, and painting that I do.

I also love the girls' table top chalkboard/whiteboard/drawing paper easel finally has a home hanging up from the crate shelves. It's a great toy for them to play with, but it takes up a lot of space and looks messy when it's just floating around the room. Now it's easy to get down and put back up again, and adds rather than detracts to the beauty of the room.

We just hung the crate shelving up this week, and I really like too. Which is a good thing, since it took forever to paint them all. The rough cut wood just ate up paint. It took nearly half a gallon of white paint just to prime them, and three to four 2-ounce bottles of acrylic paint to color each of them. Spray paint might have been a better option, but it's too cold to spray paint in the winter and I wanted the large color selection I had with Americana paint. But I am glad to have it done!

This blue pegboard holds my sewing thread an miscellaneous tools and supplies. It's another thing I love, both for the rainbow of color it brings to the room, and because it belonged to Collin's great-grandmother Jennie. Even some of the thread up there was hers. I love being able to carry on the tradition of creating beauty from her.

My gumball machine filled with wool felted bouncy balls doesn't have any purpose other than to bring more color and cheer into the room. It's still looking for a final home, but I do like it next to my desk.

Last, but not least, is this nice big bulletin board. It used to be in my mom's school room, but she recently downsized to a smaller cork board, so my sister Kristen gave it a makeover and gave it to me for Christmas. Before it was a medium brown frame with 70s goldenrod burlap, so she painted it green and covered it in cream burlap. It looks great! Right now we have it covered with our leaf identification cards, but there are so many other things I look forward to doing with it.

That's almost it for finished projects, except a small-ish one that I'm especially happy about and will post in a couple days. I'd say the room is about half finished right now. We still have a long list of projects, including

• Paint the school supply hutch (blue and white)
• Paint the file cabinets (light blue or turquoise)
• Make a yellow ruler growth chart
• Make vintage handkerchief curtains
• Refinish the wood on some of, and paint the rusty metal on all of the antique school desks
• Mount large maps to canvas and hang them on the wall

So there's plenty to keep us busy for a long time. But now that we're starting to get somewhere, I'm extremely happy. It's becoming a really nice place to hang out, to sing songs, to color, and to create. In fact, as I write this right now Annie is yelling to me from the school room saying, "Mama, I want to sing songs!" So I think I'd better head that way, and set up a cd for her. See you next time, when I'll show you our cute perpetual calendar makeover!