Instructions for creating a gift calendar digital style:

Since my son was a baby we have produced the William calendar for all interested family members. This year I decided to dress it up a bit with some digi scrapping techniques. With some custom calendar templates, photos and digital paper, putting this calendar together is as easy as 1-2-3. Most of the patterned papers used for this project came from the disc included in Autumn Leaves Designing with Digital idea book. The kits included are beautiful and the tutorials included on the disc are very helpful for anyone interested in learning more about digital scrapping.

1. Download and unzip all of the LM 2007 calendar files. NOTE: These are each zip files and are quite large. It may take a long time to download each one, not recommended on a dial up connection. Download them all and unzip into a folder on your computer. The images are all PNG files and should be compatible with all graphics programs.
   January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December, Horizontal Cover, Vertical Cover, Page Frame, Horizontal Page, Vertical Left Page, Vertical Right Page.
   
2. Choose your photos, one for each month and one for the cover.
   
3. Choose your paper for the page backgrounds or just use a solid color background.
   
4. In your photo editing program, open a new file that is 8 in. x 8 in. and 300 dpi. You will copy your elements to this file to create your page.
   
5. Open your patterned paper, select all, copy and paste to your new file. You may want to resize your paper to 8 x 8 if it was originally 12 x 12. You can usually do this by grabbing the corner of your paper with the mouse and adjusting the size until it is correct.
   
6. Open your photograph. Be sure the resolution on the photo matches that of your page (300 dpi). Resize as necessary. The final photo also needs to be approximately 7 x 5 in. Select all and copy the photo into your new file on top of your patterned paper.
   
7. Open the .png file for your calendar page. There are files for vertical photos and horizontal photos. Select all, copy and paste the file into your new file. The frames will overlay the paper and photo.
   
8. Adjust the size and position of your photo and page frame as necessary by grabbing the different layers with your mouse and moving them around.
   
9. At this point you can name and save your file.
   
10. Create another new 8 x 8 file.
    
11. Copy and past the same background paper you used for the photo page.
    
12. Open the .png file for the appropriate month and copy it into your new file.
    
13. Adjust the position of the overlay as necessary.
    
14. Name and save your file.

All of the pages and the cover can be created by following steps 1-15. The back cover was created as follows:

Open a new 8 x 8 file.

1. Choose a background paper, select all, copy and paste it to the new file.
2. Open the page frame .png file and copy it into the new file, adjusting the size and position as necessary.
3. Open the photo page for each month and reduce the size to 2 x 2 in.
4. Copy the reduced files into the new file and arrange.
5. Add drop shadows if desired (PSE has a layer style action that adds drop shadows with the click of a button.)

Print the calendar as follows:

pg. 1 Cover and January photo on opposite side, upside down.

pg. 2 January grid and February photo on opposite side, upside down.

pg. 3 February grid and March photo on opposite side, upside down.

pg. 4 March grid and April photo on opposite side, upside down.

pg. 5 April grid and May photo on opposite side, upside down.

pg. 6 May grid and June photo on opposite side, upside down.

pg. 7 June grid and July photo on opposite side, upside down.

pg. 8 July grid and August photo on opposite side, upside down.

pg. 9 August grid and September photo on opposite side, upside down.

pg. 10 September grid and October photo on opposite side, upside down.

pg. 11 October grid and November photo on opposite side, upside down.

pg. 12 November grid and December photo on opposite side, upside down.

pg. 13 December grid and Back cover on opposite side, right side up.

Trim your pages, leaving a margin for the binding at the bottom edge of each of the photo pages.

Have the calendar bound at your local office store or copy center.

You might also be interested in checking out these digital scrapping products:

Digital Scrapbooking, Vol. 5 and Chatterbox Font CD III and Dingbat Bundle

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