Upcycled Birthday Calendar

Welcome to Thrift Store Decor for February, where every month a group of talented bloggers turn a cast off item into a treasure.

This month's project is one of my favorites, I tend to like personalized ones.

Last summer my thrifting pal (hi Dii!) and I stopped in at a local shop.  The place is out of business now - they had lots of junk, but not the kind of junk I usually get excited about.


On this particular day they had this........

A homemade calendar in all of it's highly varnished oak glory.

And it came with all of these little slide in tiles....

That had numbers and months on them like this........

For whatever reason when I first bought it, maybe because I'm blind in one eye and can't see out of the other, I thought the letters and numbers were painted on - and all I would have to do was paint over the whole lot.

Na uh uh, nope, they were stickers.

Stickers that had been glued on and varnished over.

Very well glued stickers that all had to come off, which took me longer than painting. 

So sometime in December I sat down, according to the above photo I ate a chocolate foiled Santa, and I shaved off all the stickers.

The little blocks of wood also had to be sanded down to rid them of their glue/varnish combo, so I painted it white and set it aside because first of all I was sick of peeling off the stickers, and secondly I didn't know what the heck I was going to do with it.

The only thing I knew was that I didn't want a highly varnished oak something, hence the coat of white paint.

I've been seeing some repurposed church hymnal boards and thought something like that would be fun, but then I got another idea that would put this old calendar back into use, as it was before but with a twist.

Then I decided I also didn't want it white.

I gave all the oak lats a couple coats of Fusion Coal.

Fusion Mineral Paints and I were going to attempt to give the calendar an old world patina of aged copper.

At this green point, I had my doubts I was going to achieve that.  That's a pretty bright green and if you follow along here at the ranch you know I don't do many bright colors.

As I was painting brown, green, white, black, I didn't know what I was doing, but I kept doing it.

You know what copper looks like after it turns green?  I mean real copper with a real copper patina.  Picture that in your minds eye.

Then picture someone painting over the aged copper parts with bits of the aged copper showing through the paint along with the new copper.  Like old copper church roofs.

Well that was the look I was after.

The secret weapon to getting that look was Fusion Metallic paint in copper.

I just kept layering and layering until I got the look I was after, just enough shiny copper and just enough green patina.

I wanted a well worn old metal look, and I think that's what I got.

I'm pleased with how it turned out with just that bit of the green showing through, and the orange-y copper in various spots but not all over.

They say it's your B.irth D.ay, well it's our birthday too yeah.... so I'm gonna let them eat cake.

All the kids, got their name on a slide in lat, along with Brawn and I, the son in law and the daughter in law.  Just my family which amounts to 12 name tags and birth dates.

I added four big head tacks to the corner and customized a couple of the lats with chalkboard paint so I could chalk on how many candles go on their cake and the dessert the birthday person might request.

It can hold three names at a time for busy birthday months, like August and October.  It must have been a cold winter a few times.

Stencils were made out of overhead projection film because my writing isn't so great as you can see where I wrote the word chocolate.

I wanted the calendar to have some color so I simply printed off old bakery advertisements and Mod Podged them onto the medium sized lats then antiqued them around the edges.

Notice the Morningside Bakery one... that's a picture of an actual sign made by my friend Angie at Knick of Time.

The project was hung on a small sliver of wall next to our breakfast nook.  No excuse for passersby to ever forget to wish their siblings a happy birthday.

The photo above was before I decided to add the metal tack heads in the corners. 

February's cake was made this weekend, and there is no birthday in March.  But I let them eat cake 8 out of 12 months of the year.  

August and October are packed with birthdays.  Mmmmmmm.  That explains a few things, mainly the things associated with fitting into my jeans, but the upcycled calendar is a perfect way to have a visual reminder for celebrating the best in my life........ the people and the cake! 

Get your own Fusion Mineral Paint in any color including metallics, and experiment!