DIY CD Jewel Case Calendar

With most creative projects I start, I either don’t finish them or finish them months or years after a normal person would have. But thankfully, it turns out that even I am not so crap as to postpone finishing a 2011 photo calendar much later than the commencement of the year in question.

I used these templates to make the calendar (they are from a Photoshop Elements site but I can’t imagine they’d be a problem to use with full Photoshop) and followed the easy instructions in this article (direct link to pdf here) to produce a calendar image for each month. Although they recommend you print the photos with 4.75” width for ideal fit in a CD case, it cost me half as much to print them in 6” x 4.5” and accept a slightly looser fit. My office paper slicer came in handy for trimming the long end of the prints off.

I then used these instructions as a reference point for dissembling and reassembling a CD jewel case (sorry to The Donnas’ Spend The Night album, I was just not that into you) into a display rack for the calendar sheets. I’ll use the base of the rack for keeping the sheets for months that have passed.

Here it is on my desk at work. The other things there are a photo I took of an industrial machinery “start” button in The Wapping Project (yes, it’s meant to motivate me to start work), and a wind-up Totoro who goes zipping across my desk whenever I get tired of reading shareholder agreements.