Yearly Calendars

Monday, February 3rd, 2020

Getting back to the subject of documenting your work, I'd like to talk a little about making yearly calendars.  In an earlier blogpost I mentioned how I had started doing my scrapbooking on my computer and then I discovered Shutterfly.  Around the same time I purchased the Kaleidoscope Kreator software and started making millions of kaleidoscope images because it is so addicting.  I saw a kaleidoscope calendar at a calendar kiosk and thought I should create my own calendar using the kaleidoscope images I created myself.  I could pick out my favorites and create calendars to give out to family and friends at Christmas.  That was the start of my yearly calendars.

After a couple of years of kaleidoscope calendars, I realized I should start putting my art on my calendars instead.  By this time I had enough pieces done that I could create a calendar of all one subject.  My first one, my 2015 calendar, was all about flowers and butterflies, and then I did one that was all about birds.  The images I used for these were random art pieces that happened to have the same subject.  They looked pretty good together, but they were not originally made to be part of a set or series.  So for my 2017 calendar, I decided I would do another bird calendar, but this time I would make a series of 12 new bird pictures that all had the same style and look and feel. 

This set of 12 bird pictures (and the calendar) went over pretty well, so I decided each year from then on I would do a new series of 12 images that were of the same series.  My 2018 calendar was all pictures of Venice.  My 2019 calendar was all boat and lighthouse pictures from a trip I took to Maine and Canada.  And my current 2020 calendar is of all about images from Mykonos and Santorini, Greece.  I'm taking a new turn for 2021 to do something new and fun, but that will be a surprise.

Aside from having a nice gift to give your family and friends, sharing your quilts and art projects on a yearly calendar is another way to document what you do and expose your work to people who will enjoy looking at it every day for the next year to come.  By the way, most people who have my calendars have told me that they save them and look forward to turning the page each new month to see what's next.  Have fun sharing your work with your family and friends by making yearly calendars.