Paint Chip Calendar

As soon as I saw this idea on Pinterest I just couldn't wait to give it a try. I made this a little over a year ago shortly after I got my job right out of school. I thought this calendar was perfect for my desk at work. I could keep track of important work events and have a conversation piece in my cube.

I've seen this calendar done with more similar colors, but I decided to go with basically all the colors of the rainbow. The first step in creating this amazing calendar is making a trip to the hardware store to pick out paint chips. I hate it when any sales associate talks to me in a store, which is inevitably what you ask for by standing in front of the paint chip display for like ten minutes. I'm sure the paint guy either thought I was painting my house a crazy rainbow array of colors or he caught on that I was using him for his paint chips. In order to get the right size squares for this calendar, I grabbed the paint chips that have only 4 colors on them. For each color I took 2 paint chips and I picked which colors made the best ombre array for each hue.

The next most obvious item you need for this project is a frame. I went with a 19" x 15" size frame for this project. I also bought a poster board from the dollar store to use to mount the paint chips to. After cutting the poster to size, I laid out all the paint chips and made final decisions on the color arrays. For the days of the week across the top, I used a light color that looked almost identical to the lightest color in the array. I wrote the days of the week using Sharpie on the small cut-outs. The numbers don't go on the paint chips, they get written on the glass since that changes every month. After taping everything down, you're done! Now all you need is some dry erase markers and some fun events to fill up the calendar with.

Happy ombre-ing! :)