Late in 2016 I started thinking about Christmas presents. After all, if I’m going to call myself a woodworker, I’d better start coming through with the goods. The goods in this case, are a Calendar holder for my wife.
Each year my wife orders a calendar online, with all of our names already printed in and space to mark down what everyone is doing each day. It pretty much runs the household – if it isn’t on the calendar it isn’t going to happen. The calendar has always been hung from the pin board in an awkward part of the kitchen, sort of like an afterthought. I figured that a dedicated spot for it would be nice, and that a dedicated holder for it would be even nicer.
This is yet another project made using the spotted gum deck offcuts that I’ve been working with over the past year. I’ve made a couple of shop tools from them, some letter boxes, an arcade fight stick or two and a couple of other small projects, they’ve really come in handy.
But by far the most useful item in my shop is now my workbench. It was such a pleasure heading out to work on this each night. I’m trying to slowly improve my skills – being able to securely clamp wood into a vice and practice chopping out mortises by hand is great fun. Although for all my practice I still had to yield to the router for this project, no matter how hard I tried I would invariably split the wood with a single tap. The wood is so hard, yet sometimes seems almost brittle, a small tap with the grain can tear it apart. There is no room for error with this type of wood I’ve noticed, and at this stage of my journey there are plenty of errors to be made!
So regardless of how it was made, I’m marking this project as a success. I couldn’t be happier with how it looks and my wife really likes it too which is the main point. I could improve the design, I think arching the top rail would be a simple way to add some interest, but there is nothing wrong with the current look.
In fact, I like it so much I have added the most ubiquitous of all woodworking projects to my own calendar, a spice rack! I will try making the rack by hand rather than power tools, for no reason other than the learning experience.
If you like the look of this calendar holder, you can download the sketchup model for free by clicking here.
The model is slightly different to my end result, I changed some dimensions on the fly, but is near enough to what I built. Don’t forget to resize it to fit your calendar, they are not all created equal. Though if you watch til the end, you may notice that even when you build things to fit, not everything goes to plan!