12 months in words and very few decorations, while January, 2016 waits in the wings

This was the first year that Kate at The Kathryn Wheel didn't have a linky link-up on her blog.  Since I'm not on Facebook or Flickr, I no longer had a way to share my calendar with others, except on my blog.  That may have been a good thing, though, because I never created drop-dead gorgeous calendars like most of my friends who make them.  But this year, I pared down even further, by taking calendar pages and gluing them to the journal I purchased three years ago.  I kept my decorations simple, never decorating the page until near the end of the month, when I could look back on it and see what was important in MY life that month.


For January, I actually stamped both the snowflakes and the sun/moon stamp.  In case you can't read the bottom lines, "Temps raised and fell faster than night followed day."


February was all about the NBA All-Star weekend and my friend Kathy's Kings and Queens altered book I was feverishly working on.  It was also the first month I used the teacup stamp on each Tuesday entry.

It looks like I spent a LOT of time working on my friend Kathy's Kings and Queens altered book as March Madness took over the sports (basketball is my sport of choice) enthusiast in me.

April was about recycling, NBA basketball play-offs, and birthdays. 

May's calendar is a perfect example of why I don't decorate my page until the end of the month.  May, 2015 was all about the rain, storms, hail, and floods.

June was a busy month, filled with lots of activities.  My calendar decorations were all about the great outdoors and spring turning to summer.

July had me on the computer most of the time due to an endless number of blog hops.  From SOC (Summer of Color) to Where Bloggers Create to WOYWW to Seth Apter's 7th annual Buried Treasure, I was nearly overwhelmed with blog visits.  My card reader quit working, too.  I still haven't replaced it.  Instead, I now take all my photos directly off my camera, a task that is even more time consuming than before.

I did very little "decorating" on this page, because, like a fool, I scribbled prices of some tape all over it.  Then I created the two rubber stamps.  I'd heard you could create a stamp from left over rubber, but I'm not really a hodge-podge person, so never considered it until I cut the rubber on some Stampin' Up stamps.  The leftover rubber became abstract stamps I mounted on a single piece of wood.   Even though the "decorations" were minimal in August, I was tickled with what I accomplished because I created these "stamps" from rubber that would have originally been thrown in the trash.

I've said before that I decorate the pages at the end of the month, when I know better what was relevant.  If you read the minutia, you will see there were lots of days I spent helping my friend Sally, where we took many things to the thrift store and sent some stuff to the trash, mainly because they were water damaged from sitting in her garage for many years.

I went for a bit of humor when I found all the dancing bunny stickers.  They reminded me of how many of the same or similar items I bagged for the thrift store, like more shoes than I could possibly count, more blouses than one needs in a lifetime, and for the women's shelter, more unopened beauty products and toothbrushes than any one person should ever have purchased in the first place.

In October, I decided to give this puny calendar at least one more year, since I had enough pages left in this Strathmore drawing pad I bought in December, 2013.   I took advantage of the changing seasons and used leaf rubber stamps as my decorations.

For my completed November calendar, I tried to pay homage to Paris, but I'm not much of a stamper.  I had some card stock I had painted autumn colors, then cut it and collaged over the pieces with snow inspired tissue.    I did this because we had an exceptionally warm autumn which turned deadly the last Thursday of the month when an ice storm hit my city.

I had planned to dig out some of my rubber Christmas stamps, but they were mostly too large for the calendar.  So, since I had a few stickers left over from years ago, I used them to decorate the page.  Nothing to write home about, but there never is in my calendars.

Turning the page to 2016,

it's actually starting out a big mess.  One of my pens leaked all over the page right after I created it.  Not sure how I'll make it right, but I'll figure ways to hopefully make it a bit more arty as the month of January progresses.

Most of my friends who create these calendar pages make lovely stamped or collaged images to accompany the small individual days they cut from scrapbook papers.  I've chosen the lazy way of doing it, but at least I can look back on the past five years and see what happened on this day in, say, 2012.

Thanks for stopping by today.  I hope you have a wonderful New Year's Eve and New Year's Day.   May your 2016 be artful, creative, joyous, and filled with good health.  The very thought that you are sharing a bit of time with me makes me truly appreciate your visit as we count down to 2016.