'Vintage Style' Birthday Calendar by Ingeborg Dijkstra

If you're anything like me, you love the look of all the vintage layouts and projects that you see in magazines and galleries, but you're too scared to make one yourself. Well ... that's me too! But ... due to a challenge at a Dutch site I have tried my very first vintage style layout a few weeks ago and I wanted to have a go at it again.

So ... I used the gorgeous 'Nature's StoryBook' collection from Webster's Pages. The collection also has some beautiful journaling cards. Whilst I haven't used those on my Birthday Calendar, the cards inspired me to make a calendar in the first place. Here is a picture of the cards:

And these are the five doublesided patterned papers I have used:

'Nature's Manuscript':

'Plant & Nurture':

'Soar Blue Skies':
'Violette Wings':

'Wishes Come True':

The images on these papers are just perfect for cutting out, so I started looking on each side of each paper to find images I wanted to use for my calendar. I only cut images from the sides, to keep a lot of the paper for later use.

In Publisher I made a text file to use for my calendar. I converted it to a pdf file, which you can safely download HERE. I printed the document on off white paper to match with the patterned papers I used.

I used 6" x 6" chipboard covers as my base and cut six more pages out of kraft cardstock. I only needed six kraft pages, since I use both sides. I cut 12 (one for each month) slightly smaller squares out of the patterned papers. Some papers are scraps from other lines. I put the patterned paper squares on the kraft paper.

Using my Basic Grey 'Flourish Edges' stamps I stamped flourishes in the corners and at the borders of each page.

I added about two of the cut images to each page. I also stamped a line of Scripture on pieces of Kraft cardstock to have something inspirational on the page each month. The pages look like this:

Using my Bind-It All machine I punched holes and added binding rings at the top. The calendar can stand on its own. The pages are being flipped at the top. I added the words 'birthday calendar' with foam Thickers from American Crafts.

Here are two of the finished pages:

I think a birthday calendar makes a great gift (or you can just keep it for yourself) ... Happy crafting! x

Ingeborg.