I decided to make my own (manual) whereabouts clock for our family. I simply got an unfinished oval plaque of wood from the craft store, along with 6 clock hands, some small round metal & cellophane tags (6) (although the metal and paper tags would have been better), and a sheet of circular clear bubble stickers. I finished the wood by staining, then rubbing on blue paint (to go with the colors of my room), and sanding it off again. It’s a finishing technique in one of my craft books, but you could choose any finishing technique.

Once the wood was colored, I used a pencil to lightly draw in the scrolls like you see on the Weasley clock from the movies. I was able to erase and perfect them with the pencil. Once they were right, I chose a gold-colored permanent marker, and traced all of my lines.

I counted and saw that I had made 15 scrolls, so I sat down and came up with 14 of our most common whereabouts locations, leaving one blank which we can fill in with an erasable marker later. My designations are: Home, Work, School, Doctor, Lesson, Club Meeting, With Saints (church), Bike Riding, On a Date, Travelling, Practice, ______’ House, Pool (for summertime) and Errands. Using the link above to examine the movie photo, I carefully wrote in the designations with my permanent marker.

Lastly, using the online photo as an example, I painted in a darker blue paint around the outside edge of the clock.

Then I finished the wood plaque with a polyurethane spray sealer. While that was drying, I went through my photos and found faces I could cut out that were the right size, for each member of my family. For each one, I first placed a circular bubble sticker, centered, over the face (this acts like the glass covering a framed photo). I used this sticker as my guide to cut the face out, keeping about 1 centimeter out from the sticker’s edge. I then glued this circular photo onto one of the metal and cellophane tags. Once these were all done, I glued each of these onto a clock hand, using Liquid Nails.

When everything was dry, I carefully measured and marked the center of the clock, found a screw the right size (I tested it first on a scrap block of wood), then screwed in all the clock hands into the center of the plaque. I made it just tight enough to hold each hand in place, but loose enough to be able to move them.

For the blank designations on my clock, I cut a piece of packaging tape about the right size, and placed these over the blanks. We can now just right in a designation which doesn’t fit the ones already there (like scrapbooking or hiking), and later erase them.

The kids and I are having fun moving our photos around, and it’s so great to be able to glance at the clock and see where everyone is!