By Sandi Genovese
McClatchy-Tribune
Remember daily planners and appointment books? Before electronic tablets and smartphones, everyone I know kept track of their days and weeks and months in some kind of daily planner. If you look in the drawer where you keep old wallets, I’ll bet you will find an old planner or two. I found a couple with fabric covers and a few with covers made of leather. But, whatever the cover material, all of them had a ring binder inside meant to bind the calendar pages into a book.
It’s easy to recycle these dinosaurs into marvelous mini scrapbooks. Simply remove the daily sheets and use one as a guide to cut new blank papers for your newly recycled scrapbook. All you need is a hole punch to punch the binding holes and you have a mini scrapbook in the making.
After you fill the planner with blank scrapbook pages, it’s fun to divide the pages into sections with self-adhesive tabs, available at any office supply store in nearly every color imaginable. I made a summer scrapbook that I divided into sections for each summer month. I recycled another daily planner into a mini scrapbook for an 8-year-old friend with the tabbed pages dividing the book into sections for family, for pets, for trips and for friends.
The beauty of repurposing these sturdy daily planners into mini scrapbooks is the ease with which you can personalize them. Select the theme, the color palette and your favorite craft supplies and you will be surprised at how quickly these old planners transform into new little memory keepers. And if they lasted a year in your purse or pocket, they are certainly sturdy enough to house some of your favorite photos.
Storing photos may not be the intended purpose of daily planners, but the first two I recycled turned out so great, I actually bought a couple of new planners and tossed out the pages just so I could convert them into more mini memory books.
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