Altered Book Calendar Februrary 2012

I am participating in The Craft Barn's 12 Week Calendar Challenge. Each week has a different theme and each day one member of the design team posts their take on the theme. You can make one calendar creating a month each week or you can create multiple calendars with the full year on each one. I have decided to make my calendar in an altered children's board book. This is my first altered book project and so far it's a lot of fun - but very time consuming.

I was not able to complete my January page in time to meet the challenge deadline last week, so I'm starting with February. I decided to get that month done so I could try to meet the deadline this week. I'll go back and finish my January page and post it later.

This week's challenge was to use the color red and heat embossing. I painted the page with dark red acrylic paint. I stamped the background of the page with a script stamp and attempted to emboss it in cream. That was a disaster. I don't know if it was because I was stamping on a painted surface or because the page wasn't laying flat, but I could not get a good stamp anywhere. I tried to fill in thinking it would just end up adding to the distressed look anyway, but it just was a mess. Fortunately most of the mess got covered up with everything else. I had no way to salvage it other than to just trash it and I didn't want to do that. Lesson learned. I also embossed the same script on the little pocket. That turned out much better. The frame behind the calendar is a piece of chipboard cut with my Labels Nestie. I inked the edges and embossed them in gold. I also embossed the wings on the heart.

The tag in the pocket is to write important dates, such as birthdays. I also thought I could tuck little notes or appointment cards, etc. in the pocket.

Thanks for looking!