Make a Calendar for a Christmas Gift on CafePress.com

It is hard to believe that 2008 is just around the corner, this year went by so quickly! But soon we will be thinking about the holidays. A great holiday gift is a calendar and now you can make one at Café Press.com for your friends and family, or you can even make one for sale. It is fairly easy to set it up and put it on the site.

The first step is to create an account with Café Press.com. They will ask you if you want to create a Basic Shop or a Premium Shop. Basic Shop owners do not pay a fee for their shops, and typically they sell only a couple of items, where as Premium Shop owners pay a monthly or yearly fee for their shops and they sell a wide variety of options. Select the choice that you feel is best for you. Give your shop a name. Everyone that has an account with Café Press.com has a shop.

Then select Make Products and look for the Greeting Cards and Calendars. Under this option, look for the calendar that you like the best. There are several choices. There is an oversized calendar, a one page calendar, a regular sized calendar and a vertically sized calendar. Café Press has so many products that once you see what they have available, it may inspire you to create even more products than just the calendar you came to create!

When you select the calendar it will first ask you to load the cover image. You will then either upload that image from your computer, or you may have images already uploaded into the Café Press system. It certainly can save you time if you upload the images ahead of time, but it is also helpful to do this step by step and load it one image at a time to keep things organized.

The system is very self-explanatory and you click on each month to open it up and then load the month's image into it. It will also show you exactly what the image will look like so you can see if you are pleased with it, or if you would like to make it look differently.

I found this system very easy to use to create a calendar of sunflower images. It took me about half an hour to get the images ready in Paint Pro and then another half an hour to load the images into Café Press.com. It was so much fun; I am trying to think of more ideas for other calendar ideas.

There are other online systems that you can make calendars with, if you do a Google.com search you can find them. Lulu.com offers the ability to make calendars, books and other materials.

Making your own calendar can be a unique gift to give at the holiday time. It can also be a great product to sell if you have something different that people simply can't find in stores and they like your calendar. Café Press.com's system is very user friendly and really walks you through the system. Before you know it, you'll be ready to make another calendar!