So, are you thinking about a summer fun list or a summer bucket list? Has your summer already begun or is it yet to be? This is my Summer fun list and how I made it:
If you just want to skip to the making of the list, scroll down, however I need to explain something for those that are interested. First of all let's talk about what you class as summer to what I class as summer. For all my American friends with children of school age, summer lasts about 10 weeks I think and on the whole has already started. For those of us in the UK with children of school age, summer is 6 weeks, the last 2 of July and the whole of August. For those of us in the UK with children at university it's more complicated, but depending on where they study and what course they do you're probably looking at 8 to 10 weeks, ending sometimes mid to late September. To add to that confusion, if you have a child at the end of either their compulsory education doing GCSE exams, or what comes 2 years after that, A-Level exams, then they finish, well, on the day of their last exam.
I have one at university, but he's only going to be home for a couple of weeks as he has picked up 6 weeks work at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. My other is just finishing his A-levels with one more exam next week.
So I get a long summer this year right? NOPE, well, not exactly. I work in local schools, so I will still be working up until the end of that 2nd week in July. :-( BUT I only work a few hours a week and can arrange other activities around that, so I decided my summer list could start this coming weekend!
Because I will have those hours for work to fit around I decided my summer bucket list needed to take the form of some sort of calendar. And so, this project was born.
I went through my stash of watercolour paper and found a pad that I had picked up from my father's house after he passed away recently. It's fairly heavyweight, I think around 300lbs, is 12" by 18" and is a bound pad, where it is glued on all 4 sides and you use a pallet knife or other blade to separate the pages AFTER you've finished the piece (it keeps your paper flat in the same way taping it to a board would).
You can't see very well, but I pencilled in a rough idea of spacing. I made a 1/2" border all around the outside, a 1" space across the top for a title and 1" across for each of the weeks I needed to include (11). Then I split each row into 7 columns for the days of the week.
Since this was only rough spacing I did not worry too much about those columns being even and so went with 1 1/2" working from each side into the middle, which left the centre column wider than the others.
I made a template for the boxes from a piece of card. I cut a piece that was 1" by 1 1/2" then trimmed it down a little, rounding the corners. And I used my 0.8mm fineliner pen to draw around it, 77 times!
Because I know my spacing would be off due to that centre column being wider, I drew the two end columns first on each row, then the middle, then filled in the gaps.
I pulled out my French Curves and pencilled in a border that kind of matched the 1/2".
I knew I wanted to spray colour for the main panel, but wanted to keep those edges white for something else, so I masked the edges off using masking fluid.
Masking fluid has a habit of completely ruining your brushes so I have taken to applying it with a cotton bud (q-tip).
I took a Dylusions spray in blue that I have watered down by half again, and a spray I made from water and a lilac Inkadink and covered the page.
I rolled a roll of kitchen towel across to mop up the puddles of ink.
I removed the masking fluid and went over the edge with a thicker tip pen. I used a fineliner pen to write in the dates into the boxes, I thickened up the line on the Sundays with a chisel tip pen and I wrote in the words. I used a black calligraphy pen for the title and metallic calligraphy pens in blue and purple for the list.
I thought about leaving it there but I decided it needed something more and I wanted to include more items for the summer fun list anyway.
I used my french curves again and drew another line outside the original border, in a similar way but not trying to match it exactly. I filled in the outside with a black brush pen then grabbed a couple of metallic jelly roll pens and wrote the extra words into the gap that was left.
I mounted it onto a pin board that I had spare, using sewing pins at an angle (less visual intrusion into the piece than push pins), and put some spare push pins around it for attaching anything I need to over the summer. I used 3 push pins at the bottom with 3 bulldog clips to make somewhere else to store items.
A closer look
The list is:
- Visit C.A.T. (Centre for Alternative Technology)
- Movie marathon
- Walk in the park
- Bake bread
- Start (or that should be restart after I killed my last one) a sourdough
- Art outside
- Finish writing Jochobed's story
- Handwrite notes and post
- Sculpture museum
- Beach
- Watch the stars
- Geocache
- Live jazz
- Dance
- Dinner in the park
- New recipe
- Fruit picking
- Eat something new
- Summer fayre
- Go puddle jumping
- Haughmond Hill
- Cinema
- Make a garden water feature
- Have a luau
- The Wrekin
- Crazy golf
- Spend a whole day reading
- Proper Picnic
- Bonfire
You can check out the sites I link up to over in my sidebar. Before you go, why not check out my
recipes index page, or my
craft projects index page, I am sure you will find something there to interest you.
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