Is it too early to start with the Christmas projects still?
Well, you’ll have to forgive me, but this baby might decide to be born any minute now, so I’m trying to get a bit of a jump start on things this year. So you can stop throwing things at me. 🙂
I’ve done these advent calendars for Kennedy with little mini gifts for each day for the last couple of years and of course, it’s always a big hit. What kid (or person) wouldn’t love that? I think it’s not so much about what’s inside as it is about the fact that I took the time to put it together for her and bring a little extra fun to each day for her as Christmas approaches. This year, I came up with the easiest, most brilliant and fun idea for what’s inside the advent calendar ever. Really, I’m so excited about it. I can’t tell you what’s in it now of course, because Kennedy might find out, so stayed tuned to Facebook and I’ll tell you all about it on Dec. 1. Or around then.
On to the calendar itself!
I’ve always just stuck everything in little numbered bags or packages, but this year I wanted something that might look a little prettier too and not just be a random jumble of clutter in the corner of the living room. I love what I came up with, mostly because it only takes about an hour to make and it looks so stylish and tidy leaning up against my wall there.
So here’s how it started:
I did all this a few weeks ago, so Halloween stuff was still up. And there was a random piece of metal that made its way downstairs from the nursery reno going on upstairs. These things happen. I found this piece of scrap MDF in the garage, so I decided to use that. I’ve seen similarly sized pieces for about $5 at the hardware store. They may have even been bigger, so you could probably even get two calendars out of one piece.
Kennedy and I painted it up with some old gray paint that I found in the basement, then we stamped some letters on it. It didn’t work out so well.
So I painted over it and grabbed some wooden letters from the craft store instead.
I hot glued some ribbon that I had in my stash around the sides to cover the raw edges of the MDF. At some point I also added the clothes pins on in rows of three with hot glue as well.
Bam! Just like that, a fun new advent calendar was born!
The bags are just plain white bags, stamped with some silver ink and a Christmas stamp, then I wrote the numbers in by hand. It’s all so easy, but when you put it all together…
It just works!
This would make a great pre-Christmas activity that the whole family could do together, minus the step where the bags are filled with goodies, of course! It would also be so fun as a craft for a friends’ get-together one evening. It’s quick, cute, and really inexpensive to make!
So there we go! I guess the Christmas decorating/crafting season has officially been started! Have you started on your Christmas stuff yet this year?