Here’s the latest curated DIY: an acrylic weekly calendar!

With school starting, life has slowly been picking back up for us. Since Ella’s school is starting out with distance learning, we wanted to find other ways for her to be safely social. We’ve signed her up for a few weekly activities and I had the idea to make a pretty schedule for her to follow and mange herself. I imagine it will help me keep things straight too!

I love the look of acrylic calendars and thought I could make one myself. And I’m so happy with how it turned out!

If you want to make your own, here’s what you’ll need:

I started out by taping off sections to create the rectangles. Do this on whichever side you plan to be the back of the schedule because that’s where you’ll paint. I measured each rectangle to be an inch wide and half an inch between each rectangle. You should also tape off the ends of your rectangles so that you can keep one continuous horizontal line.

Then I got to do the fun part: paint! I wanted peach and pink shades to coordinate with Ella’s room but you can get really creative here.

After removing the tape and scraping off any bleed through, I put on my alphabet stickers. This is where my vision really started coming to life!

Next up were the magnets. I found a sheet of small magnet squares on Amazon– the only problem was they were black and didn’t match my vision. But they were a good price so I got them thinking that they might still work if I painted them gold somehow. I used a gold chalk paint marker and it still worked perfectly!

I also used a chalk paint marker to write “Ella’s Week” at the top. That took a couple tries but it comes off really easily so don’t worry if you make a mistake or you don’t love how it’s turned out. All you need is a paper towel to wipe it off if it’s still wet or a little household cleaner if it’s dry. Or you could be really smart and print off what you want it to say in a font you that you like and simply trace it (my friend messaged me this idea and I thought it was genius!)

One of my favorite parts of this process was making the activity sticks. I wrote out Ella’s activities and then decorated each end with paint, stickers, or pieces of card stock I already had. Then attach magnets to the back of each one and you’re done!

Initially, I was just going to have it be her extracurricular activities but thought it would be fun to add her birthday and holidays. It was so fun to personalize all of them!

And there you have it! A sweet little calendar to help Ella know what she has coming up every week. It was daunting at first but honestly, this was easier to make than I thought it would be. And more fun! The great thing about this project is that it’s so easy to customize for yourself. I had originally planned on just using dry erase markers to write in her activities so you can forgo the popsicle sticks and magnets altogether. Or if you’re wanting to accommodate multiple activities on one day, you can put multiple magnets on each line. You could also do this using a bulletin board and make your own prints to decorate it. I did what worked for me and my vision; you do what works for you and yours!

xo

eb