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Monthly Archives: December 2021


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WOYWW 656- but still a calendar one sheet!

Happy nearly-2022 WOYWW to all. An obligatory desk shot, but as I am working on a different desk it’s very boring, I’m sure. Sorry about that.

The other desk is not so much a desk as a deskTOP.

The Hubster listened to me moan and complain for months about my fear of losing the program that I love when I eventually have to give up my 2009 Mac Mini running (wait for it) el Capitan! Word is that the newest OS breaks my program. My clever hubby hunted thru his old Mac Mini stash to find the best one and gave me the gift of upgrading it to Catalina (and making it work) for Christmas. It took days. It is a slight struggle, like any change is, but overall it’s fab. The only thing that totally broke is the Cricut running SCAL (also from 2009 LOL!) but the old mini will get hooked up to the Cricut so I can carry on using that when I need to. I don’t feel like I need a new cutter, so I’ll be happy with that.

One other gift to share is a tee shirt from my darling daughter. She knows what I like LOL!

To make up for my boring desk, I have an unusual landscape version of my 2023 one-sheet calendars for you. Hope you will find it useful!

And normal WOYWW will likely resume next week, although I am toying with the idea to take a week off. Actually, I’m toying with a few things for 2022 but so far nothing is settled….yet.

Happy New Year, if I don’t see you again before the next WOYWW!


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Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas!

I will be adding a number of 2022-2023 One Sheet calendars over the next week. That lets me spend precious time with my family. I hope your Christmas is a happy, healthy, and festive one!


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Outside lights

Not the greatest photos, The Hubster snapped them in a rush to share with his parents and mine, as well as dear son, way far away in San Francisco. We didn’t do any staging, so here it is, warts and all!

For those who don’t know, this used to be two houses, now combined into one, hence the weird two-different-doors situation.

He snapped a couple of “artistic angles” that may or may not be totally in focus LOL!

And just for fun, a shot of the BBQ hut, when The Hubster was cooking brisket at 4:30am last week.

Quite festive, am I right?

From here on it is mostly calendars to finish out the year. Have a lovely holiday season, no matter how you celebrate – or not!


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WOYWW 655 – It’s almost Christmas!

A happy, festive, but safe and Covid-free Christmas to all my WOYWW desk-hopping mates!

It’s all about the holiday decor this week, not a desk in sight. We got a new tree! It’s one of the pre-lit three-part snap-together no-fluffing required ones and I swear within 10 minutes of opening the box, the tree was up and it! It finally ended the age-old argument between me and my darling daughter about White Lights only (me) or Coloured Lights (her.)

Here is a short video about how one like ours works. Watch it on 1.5x speed (or faster) just to see the ease of set up. We got ours at Costco and I would highly recommend it.

The rest of the house is quite festive, but none so much as the front room!

The Bakery statue of the two pigs you might recall – it was a Christmas gift from last year!

And a quick shot of some of my favourite ornaments:

Two were gifts from the same friend. And one well-loved by darling daughter:

I have some outside shots but you might have to pop back tomorrow to see them – stragglers (of which I am one most weeks lately!) will get to see both.

No If you HAD to… this week. Life this year is full of enough hard choices!

Have a great week and a lovely Christmas.


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Another Most-requested – the Doily Calendar 3x4s

This design was one of the first ones that I did that got picked up, year after year, by calendar blogs. So many of them list 10 or 20 or 25 or 50 printable calendars and many of them listed this one. If I don’t make it I get asked again and again. Only the Pretty CD Circle one is nearly the same for requests and downloads.

And I have done the 2023 version as well. I have been asked for 2024 and 25 as well, but that won’t come for a while!

The last WOYWW before Christmas tomorrow! How time flies…


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Calendars – DIY Spanish Sunday to Saturday only!

Well. I had planned a few calendar posts out, to free up my time to spend with family, but once I posted that I may no longer be able to make them if I upgrade my Mac and lose my program, I started getting comments and emails from people asking for very specific things far into the future. I had a request for 2024 and 2025! Yikes. The thing is, once I make the month blocks and check them a few times to make sure they are correct (who remembers the set I made with an online calendar that was WRONG? Thank goodness I could like to it’s wrongness LOL!) then making the calendars themselves is not hard. And it is pretty speedy if I don’t mess about with the fonts. I have my favorites but some of them are tricky to line up, especially if they are a bit … bouncy, IYKWIM. So making another 2 years will take a bit of time. And once I do one, I’ll get loads of requests to convert all of them for those two years. No time to do that now.

So, I had a request from a long time Calendar fan from Uruguay. It’s interesting, because unlike many Spanish speaking countries, they use the Sunday to Saturday format (which is the one I make most often) rather than Monday to Sunday. Making the Spanish ones for her isn’t hard, just a little editing each block to replace the English with the Spanish. But I expect one people see it I am going to start getting requests for the Monday to Sunday version – which requires heavy editing of the blocks. And so on and so on and so on…

So here are the requested Spanish DIY calendars. Making the CD sized ones size ones was easy enough so I did it. CD one first – there are very faint grey lines for the cutting, but as usual you could cut the sheet in half and trim so the block is centred and decorate the whole outside. This uses the circle CD calendar but you get the idea!

The CD sized ones are two-to-a-page

I’ve shown decorating them 100 times so I won’t again. Anything from a strip of patterned paper to a major ink&stamp job can be used.

Enjoy.

Tomorrow, the Doily 3×4 cards – another oft-requested one, for 2022 and 2023.


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ATC book finished

Not really much to crow about as it was basically drying time that held me up form being able to share the final item yesterday. But with the holidays looming and time short, I am just about keeping my head above water. I still have the DIY calendars in Spanish to sort out and I and woefully behind on my WOYWW visits. That is my top priority this morning! But here are a couple of quick shots for you:

It’s quite minimalist really, just the great collage collective paper and some letters. But I quite like it and it was great for storing all the trades:

and that leaves the other one I made to store the coins that I keep from my sets!

All in all that found folder from 2003 really worked out well!

Moral of the story? Hoarding is not always a bad thing….. LOL!


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Because I never throw things away….

One of my knitting mates kindly gifted me with a folder for housing ATC cards – I am kinda running out of loose sleeves so very timely. At the same time, while having a bit of a tidy up during the Christmas decorating, I found another little notes book. It was part of one of those monthly magazines, where you get a really good set of gifts to begin with for a bit of money, then they aim to get you to spend a ton on things like collectible cards. This one was a tie in, if I recall, to a Jackie Chan animated series and was dated 2003! It is pretty compact and I like the little flaps that keep things inside.

I wanted to re-purpose it to hold ATC coins and I wanted to do it fairly simply. Those vinyl covered notebooks are hard to decorate, for me. The last one, the large format one I am using for cards, I stripped off the vinyl and painted the inside cardboard, but that proved to be problematic! Anyway for this one I decided to make use of a sheet from the Collage Collective papers.

I trimmed it to fit the flat front, leaving the black border intact and stuck it using matte medium. I brushed another layer of matte medium over the top to seal it.

Then back to the “never throwing stuff away” and I riffled thru my stash of scrapbooking letters. Problem is most of these sets came with a single letter, maybe if lucky a few extra vowels. These, I literally had all but the final C to spell ATC Coins.

I had a solution but the size on those wasn’t quite right. It worked with these two sets combined tho’. I can only assume all the Cs were consumed by many many spellings of JACKSON LOL!

I had the small-set Cs but no space. So where I am now is waiting for it all to dry, weighted down with stamping blocks. I’ll finish it up in the AM and share, but I am also deep in the weeds trying to sort out my PDFs for one of my children’s books. It’s sending me round the bend…

I am trying to find decent (preferably either free or at least a one-time fee rather than a monthly fee) flip book software because I would love to share a flip-thru of a book at some point. Not having a lot of luck with that.

I also got a request for Spanish language Sun-Mon DIY calendars for a long-time follower who uses them year after year. I should be able to sort them out for next week (I hope) and with luck then I will have all the rest of the time between now and Boxing day scheduled so we can have some very much needed Family down time.

Stay safe and well this holiday season.


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WOYWW 654 – getting close!

Happy Week before Christmas Week WOYWW!!

My desks are boring even before my tidy-up:

There is an odd item on my main desk that I will talk about soon, just not quite yet! My by-the-window desk is also very tidy.

So, yeah, ATC holders of various kinds and nothing else. The reason is most of my work is being done digitally on my desktop:

I have been deep in the weeds of the KDP world. I am taking a class on Children’s Books Creation and it has been a lot of fun to play with. I have completed three very simple books and uploaded one of them. I am seeing an odd artifact in the PDF proof that I need confirmation from Amazon it will not appear in the book when published, so I am kinda stuck till they get back to me.

Odd. I usually just use the online previewer to confirm the pages all have the important bits inside the bleed-margins but this time I got a PDF proof to see what it was like. Anyway, more on this at a later date as well. For now it is just the IYHT

Not great choices, but I think that is the point! Sad as it might be, in the days of Covid, 100% being followed by sad puppies. It says SAD, not hungry, not hurt, not whining or crying, just sad. I can live with that!

Have a Happy Desk Hop day! Next week will be all about the holiday decor!


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Ornament cards and a Envelope punch board trick!

So on Friday I added a PDF that has both little folded cards and circle tags to punch. In the past I have made ornament cards for my darling daughter, for her to give to friends at school. Lately she is more interested in picking cards to give out herself, so I have been a bit out of the habit of doing them. But while I was sorting out the top menu of Christmas goodies I was looking back on previous ones and I thought I would make a set to use in case of drop-in guests. Nice to have a stack of signed, in envelope cards that you can just grab if you are caught unawares! Two seconds to scrawl a name (top tip – have a pen stashed with the cards!) and hand it over. All you do is print then cut and fold the cards:

then punch out the circles. I find a medium scalloped square fits the cards perfectly, but you can also use a slightly larger circle or a plain square. Punch the hanger-hole and ink the edges…

then stick the round motif on it with some fun foam or foam squares (or not!) to pop it up, and add a hanger and slip it into the card:

The tricky part is the envelope, right? Well I have one of those envelope punch boards and I thought Perfect! but, then, Nope. The cards are 2.5 inches and is there a square instruction for the board? There is not, or at least not for the one I have. I think there is a different punch board for gift cards, the Mini, but I don’t have that. So I tried to be a bit logical and came up with the solution! I need to experiment a bit more, but I think it works for all squares.

Take your card measurement (in my case 2.5 inches square) and double it then cut you beginning piece to that size.

Align the left edge to the size of your card (in this case, 2.5 inches) and make your punch then score (as per the usual instructions)

Rotate, punch and score as normal and you will have an envelope that perfectly fits your card! It measures just shy of 3 inches square.

To be honest the 3×3 one would have been fine but I like the idea that I can cut the paper and punch without trying to read the stupid writing on the board. I find it very hard to read. What’s wrong with black text on cream so it’s easy? Old eyes struggle, or at least mine do. So for square cards, at least, I can just wing it with a formula.

Result!