 We just made this desktop perpetual calendar with some 3D interchangeable pieces. And we'll show you how we did it right now. What is up? A welcome back to do it, to do a builder make it. So do we. And we have new videos each week. It's January, it's a new year and what does everyone need at the beginning of a new year? A calendar. And calendar sales are hot in January. We are inspired by our Christmas countdown calendar to do a desktop perpetual calendar using that same little spinning mechanism like a simple machine. But since we can't add hot firemen to it, we thought we'd put our own spin on it. We're going to make it an interchangeable 3D accent that you could change out with the month and the seasons. We're going to gather all of our supplies. Since I am fresh out of hot firemen, we're going to start with some quarter inch MDF. I have two sheets of that and one sheet of eighth inch MDF. We're also going to use our foxy hues outdoor paints. We'll choose our colors later and then we're going to use our star bond thick to assemble it all together. And we have a special guest, 3M 12 inch masking tape. We'll be using this to get a nice engrave. Step two, we're going to make our design. We're going to use Adobe Illustrator to create our design and then turn that into a cut file. I already started by making the day, the month and the day rings. Now we need to add the words and the numbers inside these rings. So to do that, I'm going to make a copy of this entire layer. That way I won't mess with these. We'll duplicate it. I'm just going to hide this layer down here. I don't want to mess with it. Now up here I'm going to select the entire layer, which will select all of them. I'm going to lose the fill and I'm going to add a line so I can see what I'm doing. I'll use red. Red looks good. While it's still selected, I'm going to go ahead and release this, which will take this object and expand it into all of its separate objects. Say now I can grab this outer ring and we'll just delete it. I'll delete all of the outer rings. Now I want to type on these, so I'm going to go over to my type tool. I'm going to hold down the type tool and you'll see type on path. I'm going to select type on path and now if I click on the path, I can type on it, but I'm not going to type. I want to paste it on. So I'm going to copy all of the days of the month and now I'm going to click on the path and I'm going to paste. So let me go get the months. I'm going to copy all of the months and go back and click on the path and I'm going to paste and the days of the week, go back, come on, go back. I'm going to copy the days of the week and click on this path and paste. I'm going to use my selection tool. I'm going to grab all of these because if they look a little lopsided, so I want aerial bold as my font and let's make this bigger. Let's just start with like 36 point. Well, that is pretty perfect. Let me get these off of that line. It's going to look silly sitting on the bottom of my line. So I'll bring that layer back. I'll select everything. I'll change the color to brown so I can actually see what's happening. I'm going to select those numbers in months again. So to do this, I'm going to select the layer over here, this little bubble, hold shift and select it all the way down. Now this will activate all of these layers. I'm going to go over to character up at the top and there's this little thing called baseline over here on the left. And we'll just start to increment the baseline up. You see it brings it off the baseline or brings it off that line starts to bring it into the middle. Hey, 12 points looks great. But there's still that gap in between 31 and 1. So to try to get rid of that, I'm going to go to my horizontal scale. And we're just going to click this. Hey, two clicks, going to click it up. See how it kind of brings everything together. Looks like it brought December. Looks like it brought December and January too close. Let's select them. We'll go back to my character menu and we'll just click it down. That looks great. And now the days are too spaced between Sunday and Monday. We'll go back to the character tool and we'll just increase my horizontal scale until they look evenly spaced. All right, that looks good. I'm going to build the rest of this calendar out and fast forward. But if you're enjoying this Adobe Illustrator content, you should join us over on Patreon, where once a month we have a patron Zoom call where we go through Illustrator. We go from the beginnings to the end. And in the end, we'll do a project where we'll have a 3D door hanger. Step three, we're going to make all of our cuts. We're going to bring the MDF over to the laser and cut out all of our pieces. But first, we're going to paint one of these boards, whatever board we're going to engrave our date rings out of. We're going to paint one using heist haze. And then we're going to let it dry really well. Yeah, completely dry or the masking tape will not stick to it. And then we're going to come in with this 12 inch 3M masking tape. And we're going to mask it off before we do the engraving cut. Time to paint and or stain. First thing we're going to do is we're going to darken the engrave on those date rings. We're going to use some matte black spray paint and just spray them while it's still masked off. And the purpose of that is to really just make that engrave a little bit darker, a little bit more of a contrast from the top piece. And then anything that didn't engrave perfectly even will have that cover on it so that it really just looks nice and even. I already sprayed them and then I accidentally stepped on them. I didn't see them, they're painted black. So we're just going to remove the masking and we're going to paint and stain all the other pieces. Time to assemble it. We're going to bring it all together with some of the Starbond thick. It'll help fill in any gaps that we miss. We're going to start by putting our calendar piece together with the date rings. And then we'll bring all of our little accent pieces together. We're just going to glue these little rings to these little score marks here. But we're going to make sure we leave enough room so that these things actually slide. So you might add those two too. If it's a perpetual calendar you can have this on your desk all year long. And I love being able to add the little accents. Laura, as Garrett said, my sexy fireman. Your sexy fireman of the month. He's just a little less sexy. Yeah, you can do so many different things. Like we just have these four accents. These came from some tier trade kits or actually this was from a door round that we had. Yeah, we just shrunk it down. Yeah. These fit in here perfectly nice and snug. But you can put all kinds of things on there. You could do a stained accent. You could do a painted accent like it is. All types of accents. I mean, it's limitless the amount of things that you could put in the front of here. You could even make it a little more masculine and put like, I don't know, car of the month club. The file will be available for our top tier patrons. So join us over on Patreon with the rest of our Patreon family. You know we love you guys. And if you're not yet a patron you should join us over there. We have free files, a monthly Zoom call, a Facebook group, a Discord channel. And we put up some limited edition files for our patrons also. So with that I think we're about out of time. I got to go make some more accent pieces for this guy. You got to get back to work and we will see you next week where we'll do a build and make it again. This guy's got a little girth to him. Make sure he's in there. Yeah. I don't think I pushed it in all the way. I don't see. It's going right in upside down. It was jiggly.