advent calendar

Hello everyone. It’s Anna here and I can finally share my first project made with new “Merry and bright” collection. You have already seen plenty of inspiration from my fellow DT girls and it won’t be easy to beat them :). December is approaching really fast and it seems like our European summer ended like a week ago. If you have kids, you may already prepared advent calendar to help them count down to Christmas Day. If not, I am here to help you. I prepared really fast and easy version, that took me about 3 hours to finish. You can spend your last two days of November preparing this project and make your kids very happy.

My calendar contains of 24 bags and boxes filled with small candy and pieces of Lego blocks. I mixed the shapes of containers to make everything more fun. Most of them are just plain crafts bags that are used to pack lunch or candies. I always keep stack of them in my house.

I also added few square boxes in two sizes made of various papers from “Merry and bright” collection. I used very helpful box punch board. You can make single box in few minutes and you don’t even have to use single drop of glue.

Last group is a few triangular boxes made with 6*6 squares. I just glued two sides together creating a tube, used stapler to seal one side and filled the box. Last step was to rotate it 90 degrees and seal it again with staples.

I made a little hole in each bag and box and added piece of longer craft string. I hanged everything or artificial pine branch, that I use every year for my calendar. I bough it for few dollars. You can also use real pine branch. It will last only through this season but it will smell amazing. You can also recycle something you already have in your house or just use plain, leafless branch found during the walk. I seal the boxes and bags the way they have to be cut to be opened so they only last one year. I don’t have enough room to store them so I just prefer make new each year.

I used numbers from 1 to 24 as in Poland we only count down to Christmas Eve (the most important dat on the whole Christmas period and the day children get their presents). I cut them our from paper called “Countdown”. You can either do like me cutting our each number or cut the whole squares. I mixed the numbers with elements from ephemera pack using up almost whole pack. Preparing everything took me like 2,5 hour so it went really fast. I played my favorite christmas songs to soak into the proper mood. Last half of hour was dedicated to add things inside, string and hang it on the branch. Just remember to spread the number evenly so the kids will cut the boxes out from left and right side every second day. Otherwise, in the middle of December you will have one side empty and the branch will start tilting.

How do you like my idea? Are you making your own advent calendars or you just buy premade ones? My kids are always very excited for ours and they can’t imagine not having it, even if I am trying to be lazy and bribe them with the bought one, filled with chocolate.

That is all for today. Thank you so much for stopping by and see you in December.

XO Anna