My Instagram Project

365PhotosI have a little project I’ve started for 2013. It all started when I saw a cool calendar journal on Pinterest. The originator had taken a calendar and used every little square to journal or doodle something from that day and I loved the effect! Pretty and chronological and all. But honestly, I suck at keeping journals. It’s time-consuming and my life is very hustle and bustle. But what do I do well and frequently??? Take photos. I’ve loved the cool weekly/daily scrapbooking or photo or diary projects I’ve seen on other sites.

So I hit upon the idea to make a calendar with photos from every day. It’s simple because it only takes a second to take a photo and I can toss them into the calendar whenever. Easy peasy. So far I’ve been keeping up with it really well and have remembered to add the photos every day or two. I’ve also had no problems remembering to take photos … it’s not even a question. It’s just what I do. I like this kind of project.

Jan2013Calendar

Anyhow, I thought about waiting until the end of January to share my progress, but then it occurred to me that someone out there in cyberspace might want to do this too, so I thought I’d show you what I have so far and share the template with you. I have set this up so that the grey spots are supposed to be used as clipping masks and they look good as well if you just leave them blank. To use a clipping mask, you paste the photo you want to use as a new layer over the spot in question, then you right click on that new (photo) layer and hit “create clipping mask.” That way your photo shows only through that grey spot – pretty cool, no? You can find a more comprehensive tutorial on clipping masks here.

The numbers, text, etc. can all be changed as you like. The fonts I used are 1942 Report for the days of the week, Pea Aimee from Fonts for Peas for the month and Myraid Pro (an MS Font) for the dates.

Here is is for download … [wpdm_file id=2] … you can download and use personally for free, but if you want to change it and/or redistribute it on your own site that you credit back to me. I’d love to see anything that comes of this.