2012 Calendar + Bookbinding

Hi there.

Angee Butler-Carter here with another project for you.

I'm a planner. Well, I often attempt to plan but usually I end up "going with the flow" whatever that means, however I love planners and I buy one every year. With the new year upon us I decided to make my own planner this year. A few months back I happened across Kyla Roma's tutorial on how she made her own planner. She even provided the pages she designed for download. Of course I promptly downloaded them and.........forgot about them. That is until today.

Today I was inspired, motivated, and moved to action.......crafty action!

I had the pages, I had 11x14" paper, chipboard, and loads of Studio Calico kits to draw from so.......I made a planner.

Let me back up for a moment. I actually started off by watching Kyla's assembly tutorial. It's a cute fun video and it got me started and showed me how I wanted to assemble my cover.

Next I remembered a ustream that Marion filmed where she showed a bookbinding technique. A quick google search took me to the right video. M, you rock! Seriously!
Marion's video taught me how to bind my pages and attach my cover.

Being the thorough researcher that I am, here's another bookbinding tutorial for you that I found on youtube.

Now after all of that was done and watched I, finally, made a planner.

Here is the cover. It's about 99.9% finished. I just need to add the year 2012 somewhere. Suggestions?

Here are a few more pics. 

 Here is the back cover showing another picture of the binding. 

I reinforced my top and bottom stitches with extra embroidery floss (As you can see in the pics the extra knots). I used an entire skein of embroidery floss to coptic stitch my planner. I also used a large needle with an extra large eye that could accommodate the embroidery floss. 

I didn't even have to go buy supplies. I happened to have everything I needed for this project already on-hand in my craft room. The only thing I added were the printed planner sheets. Score!

In total this project took me about 2 hours to complete. That included time to watch the videos (a couple of time) and time to stitch the album in front of my computer. I just paused the videos while I stitched. I'm a slow stitcher. My first try at coptic stitching. Will definitely do more of it in the future.

I would definitely say this was an easy project. I won't be buying my yearly planners anymore. I'll be making my own. 

*All papers and embellishments were from Studio Calico monthly kits. 

Sweet Hugs. 

ABC