DIY Birthday Display Craft

Before we get too far into 2015, I have got to share a craft I made to enjoy year round.

I had a small family, but I married into a huge one! I now have 11 nieces and nephews, as well as 7 siblings-in-law.

Something else you should know about me is how much I treasure birthdays. I think they are fantastic and deserve to be celebrated by children and adults alike. I love to celebrate with the birthday people by mailing cards and making phone calls. I have birthdays on my calendars, including as a recurring event on my iCal (those recurring events – so helpful!) but I wanted to treasure them by putting them on display in a whole different way.

I chose a color of background card stock for each month, and a coordinating pen and marker color. I used a different color of background paper for almost each month, and tried to make the color scheme correspond with a big holiday in the month. October is black and orange due to Halloween falling in October, for example. I made the squares 3.5″ and then cut out the white (with small colored flecks – reminded me of birthday cake) paper slightly smaller with decorative scissors.

The months are written in cursive in a color. Down the left side, in numerical order, are the days where birthdays lie. The birthday person’s name is written in black to stand out, and lastly the year they were born (so I can always figure out how old they are, and for adults, if a milestone birthday is approaching!)

I also included anniversaries with a heart next to the last name of the couple. The heart is dark enough that it makes it easy to differentiate from birthdays. And yes – I observe the anniversary of our proposal and the day we started dating as well. (Actually, these are on the chart mostly because it helps me remember the years these things happened!)

I used my hole punch to make a hole above the month name and threaded some gold string through, double/triple tying a knot to create a circle. They hang on a giant pushpin pushed into the bulletin board near my front door. When a month is over, like January is, I just move it to the back by taking the entire pushpin out and slipping the passed month over the point and all!

This is also handy because the kids in the family are too young for Facebook birthday reminders! 

Do you love birthdays too? Let me know in the comments how you remember your family members’ birthdays!

Gift closet organization

It started when I was going through some old stuff I accidentally found. I found some treasures – pom poms, customize-able bracelets, etc. I was going to stuff it all into our Gift Closet but when I opened the door, it was a mess!

The Gift Closet is actually the closet in J’s mancave. It contains some of his stuff, but a lot of holiday items too: our small (but only) Christmas tree, ornaments for when we get a bigger tree, wrapping paper and gift bags, and any gifts I’m waiting for a birthday or holiday to distribute. I used to keep all gifts in a big gift bag …but then I used the gift bag for, well, giving a gift. And there are too many now.

I have 9 nieces and nephews, and 2 other kids that will be in my family “officially” when my BIL and his fiance get married. I already consider them family. That’s a lot of birthdays. 

Right now, there are 5 kids age 6+. I collect gifts for 3 of those kids all the time, because they are easy to shop for. As others’ birthdays approach, I get gifts for those kids too. I don’t have a bag for everyone because the little ones are easier to find things for, and harder to collect unique items for.

SO. I began with this:

This is what was in the closet already. I had more (like the pom poms) that had just been found which are not picured.

It would be nice, I thought, to have a bag for each kid, or even for each family. One per family would have been ideal, but there are 7 kids in one family unit alone, so that couldn’t have worked. Also, I’m down to only 3 big paper sacks and only a few medium-sized gift bags. (Lots of small gift bags, how un-useful.)

So I whipped out the big zipper-seal bags, and organized.

On the zipper-seal bags I wrote the child’s name and birthday. I plan on reusing these bags, and making more for the rest of the kids as the time comes.

 

There were 2 kids whose gifts would not fit into even my biggest ziplock bags, due to size or quantity of gifts. For these I attached sticky notes to label the child/birthday, but the sticky notes are easily removable.

 

I also have a few gifts that I might give someone at some point, like a handmade journal, fairy wands, and a beautiful little green bag which I could put other gifts in. These went in the MISC zipper bag.

Also, presents for all the kids will go in here – like that bag of Valentine-y heart erasers that I plan on handing out once there are no babies in at least one home.

These are the bags I’ve collected so far. They will increase as more birthdays come up (a few have just passed, for example.)

The santa bag on the right side of this picture is for miscellaneous Christmas presents for adults. Right now there’s only one item in the bag, but as we tend to do secret santa and white elephant, we’ll see what gets added!

The brown bag in the back is holiday-related but not gifts.

This is the shelf of the closet now. I moved the sticky note labels to the sides of the bags so I could easily view them.

Not so bad! It’s certainly better than it was – I had an almost-avalanche trying to get to the presents, and they were not sorted by child at all.

I’ll end this post with the customize-able bracelets I made for a niece’s birthday in September:

She’s getting the rest of the kit too so she can change out the letters as she pleases

 

Do any of you have a closet or another area set aside for gifts/holiday items? In my big family, it’s a plus to think ahead.