MDS lesson plan calendar

One of the things on my to-do list this weekend was to finish my December lesson plan for work. (Yes, we do have lesson plans for toddlers. They're filled with things like books to read, songs to sing and various art activities. Fun stuff.) I usually start with a blank calendar on white paper, fill in the activities and then decorate it with stickers, stamps or computer clip art. Well, yesterday morning I sat down at the computer to check my e-mail and was struck with the idea that maybe I could use My Digital Studio (MDS), Stampin' Up!'s digital scrapbooking software, to make my lesson plan calendar. Here is what I created:

Actually, this picture isn't completely accurate; everything to the left of Monday, to the right of Friday and below the bottom row is not printed on my hard copy. Those parts of the project are in the page bleed area, so while they are technically part of the file, they don't show up in the printed version.

Now, I haven't created much in MDS, so this is pretty basic. I started with a blank 8-1/2" x 11" page. I'm doing a winter theme in December, so I searched MDS for snowflake stamps and found a few images I liked. I inserted each image several times, moving, resizing and rotating them as needed until I was happy with the result. Then I changed the colors of the snowflakes to various shades of blue, grouped them together and changed the opacity to 50% so the images were light enough to write over.

I was debating how I wanted to add the calendar -- Draw each line of the grid in MDS? Run the page through the printer twice to print the background and grid separately? -- when I noticed that there was a way to add either a month or year calendar in MDS. Woohoo! I added a calendar for December 2013 and re-sized it to fit the whole page. Since I didn't need Saturday or Sunday on the calendar, I stretched the sides so those days were outside the printable area. Then I used the last three squares in the bottom row, which would have been empty, for the name of our theme.

Now I just need to go through and write our activities on each day, and I'll be able to check this task off my list. Thanks for stopping by!