DIY Instagram Calendar

This post comes to you out of pure necessity. Paper calendars are becoming a thing of the past with the rise of smart phones, however, it still is nice to have a paper calendar hanging up nearby for a quick reference.

I wait until after Christmas to buy a calendar at half-price. Something funny or pretty. But I completely forgot this year. Womp womp.

Enter office craftyness and instagram.

You take all those photos on instagram of your daily life, why not put them to good use? I wanted to create a page for each month using some of my instagrams. Printsgram.com is one of a myriad of instagram printing options, but these guys let you download and print on your own home printer too. Let me show you.

So go on over to their website and connect your instagram account. Once you’ve done that, click ‘create’ and select the A4 poster option to the left. This will create a poster that can easily be printed on your standard 8.5×11 paper on your home printer.

Once you’ve selected the product to create, you’ll get a screen like this where you can scroll through all of your pictures and select the ones you wish to use. If you are like me and take a LOT of instagrams, TAKE YOUR TIME when scrolling through as they have to load up ALLLLLLL of your photos and sometimes it can get a little glitchy. You can pick whichever photos you wish. You could go for a theme and use sunsets or roadways. I chose to go back in time and select my favorites from the corresponding month I was planning to use the page for. Then you just click and drag the photo to the spot you want to put it in. Add a title (I used the month it was for to keep me organized) and save the project.

After you’ve saved the project, you can click ‘profile’ at the top right of the screen to show all the projects you have created. Click on the one you want to print to open it. Then click the green ‘download pdf’ botton at the left and you’re all done! Now go back and do it again 11 more times. (Wooooooo.)

Once you have downloaded the ones you want to print, then open them in Adobe Reader and print those suckers!

NOW. We need actual calendar pages with months and dates. If you’re REALLY creative and have crazy amounts of time on your hands, you can always make your own grids in Microsoft excell. But who has that kinda time?

Google it. Printable calendar pages. You’ll have TONS of options. Print out this year’s calendar, one month per page. I like to use Calendarsthatwork.com. They have pay-to-print options, or you can print for free in 2 month increments.

Once you set the parameters of what you want, it will create it in a Word document for you to print.

This is handy as it allows you to type in important dates and such if you need. You can also SAVE the word doc template so if you need to add something and re-print later, you can. Personally I’m a write-on-my-calendar kinda gal though, so i just printed them as is.

Once you have your instagram pages and calendar pages, just tape the two together! I overlapped them with the calendar page on top, covering up the title and printsgram logo, but you can do it however you want.

Clip them together with a binder clip, and hang it up by the clip. BAAM, calendar.

Not too shabby for a zero-dollar project. (Assuming you have the paper and ink handy already.)

So now I have another chance to show off some personal photos in my ugly gray cube. Like I did with my knock off Z Gallerie chevron frame below. Gotta keep things as cheery as you can at work!