Happy deskware: Scout Creative's free pop up calendars

Scout Creative makes my desk a happier place to work

I have completely fallen in love with these papercraft monthly desktop calendars designed by Scout Creative. They are super fun, very cute and, best of all, utterly free :) You can collect your free calendar on their site on the first of every month, or you can subscribe to their email service and they will deliver it right to your inbox. Either way, you are supporting a nifty company and making your desk a more liveable place to work :) This month's calendar is a chicken coop :)

Scout Creative is a content marketing firm that specifically designs papercraft promotional items. They make all sorts of cut out and papercraft toy designs that are designed to promote, say, movies, printers, company entities..etc. They have even made little stand alone paper toy patterns for Disney. Very, very cool.

For the last year-ish, the company has designed a free paper craft monthly desktop calendar. My favorite in their archives is the July campfire scene, but the April record collection is pretty cool too. Browse their archive. The designs are clever, little color bursts that are a little tongue and cheek. They've already made my month...and I finished a PhD in the last 30 days.

Silly thing - it never occurred to me before finding these calendars that there are companies out there that produce papercraft promotional items. When I was a kid I loved, loved, loved cutting these sorts of patterns out of cereal boxes, folding and pasting. When I was doing my Masters, I even went so far as to buy a really complicated cuckoo clock pattern from a store, and assemble it. It took months, but it supposedly worked when assembled. I wouldn't know. I got the whole thing assembled, but couldn't afford the $20 of pennies that I would have had to put into the weights to get the clock started. The paper clock hung on the wall, and the weights sort of hung around my apartment. Still, that experience did not take away from my love of these little patterns. Can you imagine how much fun designing these crafts? If this science thing does not work out, maybe I'll do this for living :)

Fabu-stationary

I’m a nut for pretty stationary. The penpal of no less than 14 people when I was a teenager, I grew up hunting for quirky and attractive paper goods to scrawl my goings-on in my chicken scratch to friends overseas. Being a young teenager, before the internet was used in homes, I spent a lot of time searching for paper that expressed my personality but fit within my budget.

Today, I, like most people, have limited my extension of personal, pretty, paper letters to wedding invitations, thank you cards, holiday cards and letters to old-timers who have limited computer access. Although I’m sciencey and should be writing with black pens, and maintain sterile, serious looking calendars and notepads detailing great thoughts, I remain a sucker for pretty paper goods. In the spirit of looking for those perfect paper goods on my super low budget, I’ve found the following:

Fabulous Stationary

Quirky, pretty, personalized and, if you need a larger number of cards, a beautiful bargain. My personal favourites include:


The Calling/Business Card: $55 for 100, or roughly $0.55 a card. My information and affiliation changes frequently, but I have multiple non-sciencey meetings a year where I need a memorable card.






The Stripes Card: $125 for 100 cards, or $1.25 per card - printed. These are great if you have a need for a lot of hip save the date, thank you cards or even laid back wedding invitations. With the average cost of low end wedding invitations and thank you cards costing twice as much before printing, these cards are a groovy alternative.


KerryBeary

Greeting Cards
This CafePress shop has some highly mod, monochromatic greeting cards under the title of “Go-go Girls”. The price, while not by any stretch prohibitive, designates these cards to my low rotation deck of stationary – that is, they are used when I want to impress people with my youthful hipness..or hiposity. You can check out everything else this great designer has to offer here.

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This store has many more cool designs that are budget friendly, including hyper-mod postcards





Paper Studio

Decorative Paper/Paper to be framed/DIY Paper

I love the new look of wallpaper and I hate wallpaper. I rent, I have no money and I hate dust. Rather that hang wallpaper, I frame decorative paper or use it to spruce up utilitarian furniture (post on revitalized filing cabinet to come). Some of the prettiest papers at a low cost, for this purpose, are available at Paper Studio.