This winter I had a customer (and great friend) ask me to make a wall calendar. I got SO excited. I love calendars. Nothing makes me happier than planning out my life, making to do lists and getting organized!
I sent her some idea's of what I was thinking and once she and I agreed on an idea all plan's were a go! I looked up some tutorials online, but spent most of the planning phase having my dad show me how to use the drill...
Below you can find my guide to building your own #DIY #Wallcalendar!
Tools:
Acrylic sheet (We wanted it to be big so we used a 30x36 sheet)
A drill
Ruler
Painters Tape
Marker
two scrap pieces of wood.
Vinyl
Transfer Tape
The Acrylic sheet will come with plastic over it. I suggest keeping that on while you make your holes to avoid any scrapes to your base. I first started by putting tape on each of the corners so I could mark my measurements. Then I made four marks on the corners to base my holes on measuring an 1 1/2 inch in on each corner.
When drilling the holes I suggest doing this on a flat surface so there is no excess tension on the acrylic sheet. (We didn't have ours placed on a completely flat surface the first time and it ended up cracking when we drilled our first hole, lesson learned!) Place two small wooden blocks under the two sides you are drilling on so you have a surface for the drill to go into once it breaks the surface of the acrylic sheet.
Once your holes are drilled you can go ahead and take the tape off and clean it of any shavings. Double check that your wall screws fit into the holes before removing the plastic cover.
If all is well, go ahead and remove the plastic from the side you will be putting the vinyl on. and placing it flat on the ground. If available, place it over a grid surface so you can use the lines to make sure your vinyl is placed straight.
To create the acrylic pieces for the calendar I used my #cricut machine. I made a custom design based off what my customer wanted in terms of the side sections such as meals, notes ect.
Once I had my design looking the way I wanted it to, and the correct size I went ahead and cut it out on my Cricut. This was tricky because it's such a big design I had to divide my pieces into smaller segments so it fit on my mat. I tried to do this in a way that would make it easy to space out all the sections of the calendar such as welding the individual day squares all together, and the note's on the side together so I only had to manually match up some pieces together to get the correct distribution.
Once I printed all my pieces, weeded them out and placed them on the transfer tape I was ready to lay them out on the acrylic to make sure it all fit. As soon as I had all the pieces laid out the way I liked I was ready to remove the vinyl off with the transfer tape and placing it onto the acrylic one piece at a time.
Once it was done I went over it to make sure all pieces were flat on the board and then
I removed the #transfertape.
Next I lifted up my acrylic sheet and removed the plastic that was on the back end of the board and inserted the wall screws.
For my first time creating a calendar this big, I loved the way it turned out and so did my customer. She brought it down to her apartment in Houston and has it all hung up and ready to go. I love seeing my products in my customer's homes. I can't wait to make myself one!
If you have any questions I'd be happy to answer them. Thanks for reading!
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