The problem with calendars

Every January I have the same problem. I feel like I need some kind of personal calendar to keep track of things—meetings and appointments and trips and obligations. Something I can carry with me, in addition to the one hanging on the wall in our office. Ray, of course, has the perfect solution in his iPhone, but I can't justify, nor do I really think I want one of those.

I have been through the gamut of personal planners, those big, fat leatherbound ringbinders that hold everything you ever knew or thought you knew, plus a pen and a ruler and calculator. I have tried pretty spiral bound books with beautiful photos on the pages facing each calendar page. I have spent some years just winging it with scraps of paper stuck in my wallet and a good memory. I have found that I am just not a Dayrunner® kind of person. Anything that bulky eventually gets left at home or rattling around the backseat of my car. I have had the best luck with the cheapo little pocket planners that you buy at Rite Aid Drug, but they get pretty beat up and dog-eared after awhile in my purse.

The other day I happened to be at Rite Aid and noticed all the calendars were half price, so I picked up a little purse-sized planner. Then I came home and made this little wallet/cover for it. Maybe it won't be trashed by April this time.

I chose several coordinating fabrics from my stash and pulled out my roll of heavyweight fusible interfacing and started measuring and cutting. Once I started working this out, I got kind of enthused and decided it would be handy to include space for a little notepad as well. Of course notepads don't come in the same size and shape as the calendar, so I made one with a cardstock cover that almost matches my calendar cover. My wallet has a pocket on each side of the inside that the planner and notepad covers can slip into.

When I made my notepad, I used bond paper and cut it to the same size as the planner pages. If I had had a good, beefy stapler I would have stapled it, but I don't, so I used some heavy cotton string to sew the pages into the cover. I perforated the pages, so they will tear out without making a mess of the rest of the pad. Neat trick I learned years ago for perforating paper—sew through several layers with your unthreaded sewing machine. I added a small pocket to the inside cover for business cards and receipts.

I like the layout of the calendar pages—a week at a glance with lines for writing appointments and such. Better, I think, than little bitty squares to write in. That was a lucky find.

I jazzed up my basic wallet cover by cutting a motif from one of the coordinating fabrics and fused it onto the cover, then I painted the outside of the cover with clear, acrylic gel medium. It will protect the outside, make it waterproof and I hope make it more durable. The final touch is a piece of black elastic cord that slips around it to keep it from flopping open inside my bag.

I am pretty pleased with how it looks and its small size. The test will be whether or not I actually use it.