Monthly Tabs—Vermont Style

Every summer, my family and I go to Vermont for a week’s long vacation and family reunion.  This year was no exception. 

While there this year, I looked around for something that I could use to beef up my planner inserts.  Stickers—maybe, but finding Vermont stickers was not going to be easy.  Inserts—no I would never find those.  Pictures—sure, those I could find very easily.  But how incorporate those into my compact binders without making them too bulky (like last time) would be the hard part.  But I happened upon a little something that I knew would be great for my purposes.

I found a small wall calendar featuring scenes from Vermont.

It’s your basic wall calendar—it opens up like a flip calendar.  On the top is a picture, and on the bottom is a monthly calendar grid.  Flip the page up again, there’s the next month.  And so on.  The last thing I need is another calendar.  I don’t typically use wall calendars, but this paper was thin enough that I knew I could use the pictures for my planner.  And since they came from a monthly calendar, I figured I could use each month’s picture for my corresponding monthly tabs.  So here’s what I did:

First I got my supplies together.

This includes the calendar (obviously), a transparent fly leaf that I was willing to cut the punched holes from, and paper clips.

Next, I took out the first calendar photo, lined up the fly leaf over the part of the picture I wanted, paper clipped the fly leaf so that it would stay in place, and traced around the edges of the fly leaf.

This allowed me to know exactly where to cut the photo.

Then, using my paper cutter, I cut along the lines.

I then had my finished product.

I used scrapbooking tape (sticky on both sides and made for heavy-ish paper) to adhere the photo to my tab.

Here is the finished product:

I cut the photo large enough so that it would take up a majority of the tab but leave the punched holes exposed.  I didn’t want to have to punch the photo once it was on the tab because if I made the pre-punched holes in the tabs bigger, I figured that would allow for more ripping and tearing of the holes, and I didn’t want that.  I could have punched holes in the photo and then pasted it onto the tab, but I’m too OCD for that—if the holes didn’t line up exactly right, I would have been annoyed.  Plus, I don’t have the patience for being that finicky.  But this works well for me.  I don’t love seeing the background of the tabs, but seeing as the calendar wasn’t as wide as the tabs themselves anyway, there would have been some exposure either way.  So I decided I would have to get over that.

I repeated the above steps for the remaining calendar photos.  Here is the finished product:

For anyone who might want to see each monthly tab individually, here they are:

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

What I love about these monthly tabs is that they correspond very nicely with my Vermont postcards that I rotate at the front of my binder.

My next project is to do something similar for my section tabs.  If I can find some cute, non-girly stickers, I might just use them to decorate the tabs.  Otherwise, when I’m there next year, I might look for a calendar with different pictures and use them.  I love having scenes from Vermont in my binder for two reasons: one, it makes the binder personally mine and reflects who I am, and two, it allows me to visit my favorite place mentally when I can’t be there physically. 

We shall see what progresses there…