What can really be said about calendars? They keep us on track, they help us remember appointments, and they usually come with pictures of kittens or Dr. Who opposite the date-tracking bit. But once in a while, a designer comes up with a totally new way to represent our lives day by day and month by month.

The Gregor Calendar is a design by Patrick Frey, which is being produced in a 2011 edition by Details Products + Ideas. The idea is elegantly simple: the calendar starts off as a knitted scarf-type piece of material, and as the days go by you simply unwind more and more yarn. When the yarn is all gone, crafty types could even re-use it to make another (different, of course) scarf.

The Ink Calendar is a brilliant design from Spanish designer Oscar Diaz. It makes use of the capillary action of ink spreading across paper to show the date. At the beginning of the month, a single small slip of paper is inserted into the ink. It slowly spreads across the connected numbers, giving a tangible feeling of the passage of time, much more like a clock than a calendar.

This partial-year calendar is more of a marketing ploy than anything else, but the mechanism is so interesting that it might just find a market in full-year calendars. Designed for leaf blower manufacturer STIHL, the calendar counts off the days in Autumn, and at the end of each day a “leaf” falls off of the calendar on its own. The device is supposed to simulate leaves piling up in the fall; just imagine how much fun you could have blowing those pieces of paper away with a leaf blower!