One-a-Week / 3

In my everyday life, I am a boss. Yep, believe it or not I tell people what to do, and often how to do it. The number one thing I tell my staff is that they have to have a calendar, and they have to update it and give it to me once a week. It’s really the only requirement I have. I manage a creative department, a tech department, pr, and marketing. This rule applies to all of them. How they manage their projects is totally up to them, but they need to actually produce a calendar. And after a while, you know what happened? They all begin to rely on the calendar. It’s magic. It makes you excited to get stuff done.

When something is important, I dedicate a calendar to it in personal life as well. Like this blog. Our little labor of love. I use to do everything digital, an I just felt like things were slipping through the cracks so I went on a hunt for an editorial calendar style planner, and was not successful in finding one.  So I made one. I am not over the moon excited with how the cover turned out, but I am super excited about how the insides turned out. Thanks to this pinner, I had a guide to follow!

There is a folder (regular file folder with a 1/2 cut on the side facing up to make it easy to open) on the left to feed the used pages into, so when I open the book, the current week is staring back on me. I also printed a tiny little calendar for reference on dates and attached it with glue dots.

I printed out 52 of these sheets I made, and brought them and the folder to staples along with two pieces of chipboard and had everything cut to size and spiral bound for $6! Feel free to use the format I did. I look at what others did and adapted to my needs.

Now, all this was the simple part. The plain chipboard was kind of depressing, so I had this brilliant idea of using heat transfer sheet to iron my logo on the cover, let me save you some trouble.

Pretty gross! Maybe it was the brand I used, but it just didn’t work and I was super bummed out. Take a lesson from my #fail and maybe deal with your cover before you cut and bind it! So, I decided to print the logo on presentation paper and glue it with a glue stick. Another bad idea.

For all the Home Movies fans out there: Double Lamo. I was getting ticked off because I felt like I ruined it beyond repair and was mad at myself for not figuring this out before I bound it at Staples. If this chipboard just simply would feed through the printer, that would have been ideal. I actually thought about whipping out the gocco, but it hardly seemed worth it for one print. So  here is what I landed on.

Yep! This is what you use to print fabric through your printer. Years ago Ink Bloom sent me a roll to review and we made a pretty great pillow and then stored it away. Basically it’s a roll of sticker paper and you stick the fabric to it and it feed through the printer, and then you peal it off. Imagine a HUGE address label that fills up a whole sheet. Well I printed ON in instead of using it to guide the fabric, and ended up with a huge sticker with my logo on it.

I cut it to side and slowly removed the backing and stuck on, then decorated with washi tape. It’s a bit more “homemade” that I wanted it to look, but I will live for how.

Let me know if you give this a go, and what you do with your cover!

Like small projects? Check out other one-a-week projects!