I know the temps are hot right now and winter feels like it will never come. We all know it will and it’ll be here before we know it.
Why not take some of this time while you’re stuck inside to start planning your gift giving for the remainder of the year. Not just Christmas but birthdays, grandparents day and anything else your family and friends celebrate.
I want to share with you something that I created for myself and just started using. It is a calendar that is only for gifting, I write nothing else on this calendar. It can be printed as full sheets or printed and folded into a half page size booklet. Couple this with the project planner and you’re ready to go shopping, or stash diving, for the materials you’ll need to make the gifts coming up soon. Don’t have the project planner? Get it HERE!
I don’t just add gifts that I am making to this calendar, I add any gift giving occasion. This helps me to see what I have time to make a gift for and what I don’t. I set it up so that the week starts with Monday, most celebrations are on the weekend and having the weekend days next to each other helps you see the time more clearly.
I printed mine out booklet style. Use the “portrait” setting. There’s a blank space to add the year and you can print the pages in any order you want. That way if your planning begins at a different time of year, like when school starts, you can just reorder the months as needed, add the year needed and not waste any of the paper. This gets a bit trickier if you decide to print the booklet version.
These don’t have to be printed out to be used, they can be filled in using most pdf software and saved as a new file.
I’m not adding a ton of detail, just the person’s name, time of party, if there is one, and the gift. If I’m going to be making the gift I will highlight it with bright pink to remind me. This calendar will probably live with my cleaning calendar, I’ll share the next month, and when I do that each month I look at what’s coming up, including for the first week of the month after that, just so nothing sneaks up on me. I will also save it until I have done my basic planning for the following year. Then based on the celebrations I went to, weddings, baby showers and so on, I’ll know what kind of card or text to send and when.
After saving the file and getting ready to post this I thought about also leaving the spots for the days of the week blank so that you can change the first the day of the week to be what you would like. If that is something that interests you message me and I’ll share one with you.
A little planning now can save money, time, headache, heartache and “I owe yous” later this year. In a future article we’ll talk about “knit/crochet worthy” people. We all have our boundaries, be thinking of yours as you plan and if this is new to you, stay tuned.
Happy making!