Advent Calendars

For some odd and unfathomable reason I decided to make my family Christmas presents this year. To be totally honest, I've done this many times in the past, and have always really enjoyed it, but this year I think I took on the most ambitious project of all: The advent calendar.

And I needed to make FOUR.

By December 1st.

Crazy.

I'm not sure why I decided to pick something so random or so time-consuming, but I did. I really had no clue how even to start, so I searched around a bit until I found this blog with some pretty good tutorials. But since no one really had any kind of post on how to make exactly what I wanted and in the interest of sharing with others what I learned along the way - I thought I'd post a mini-tutorial here.

First I started off with this beauty (via Land of Nod) as my insipration and kind of went from there:

First order of business was to cut the pockets. Instead of using all sorts of random colors I decided to just use traditional Christmas reds and greens (except for the calendar for my sister - because she decorates in blue and silver but I'll explain more later) and so I cut out 25 little 3"x3" squares of felt for each one. I ended up using 5 different colors - 3 greens and 2 reds - and just used those 8.5"x11" sheets of felt from JoAnns.

Next I had to come up with 25 Christmas themed pictures (harder than you think) for each pocket and then cut those out. Followed by their corresponding numbers 1-25. (It was a lot of cutting). Probably the hardest part was decided what should go where and in what color. It's pretty stressful trying to make sure you don't have 6 green squares in a row!

 

Then came the sewing.

And sewing. 

And still more sewing. 

Travis will attest to this. I spent literally every nap time and every evening (that I didn't simply crash) sewing up these bad boys since early October. I think Trav felt thoroughly ignored and neglected. Poor baby. Although I was able to finally watch the entire season of Firefly and the movie Serenity - both of which I thoroughly enjoyed.

For the hand-stitching parts, I bought some fun twisty embroidery thread from JoAnns which came with lots of wonderful colors. Since I don't know how to embroider, I used this basic stitch guide and sort of made up the rest as I went.

After all the sewing was done, I ironed on a square of fusible webbing to the back of each piece (just a little smaller than each pocket) so that the threads wouldn't catch each time you pulled the candy or papers out of the pockets. Sneaky me.

The next big step was sewing each individual pocket to the green felt backing. Travis was floored that I would actually choose to do this all by hand, but I figured since I already done so much by hand, using the machine would be a little like cheating. I might as well make the pockets look extra pretty too.

After sewing on each square individually with some fun green thread, I sewed (used the machine here kids) the large piece of green felt to a matching piece of red felt so all those stitches were hidden (I know it's the back, but I was worried about it). Lastly, I sewed together a layered brown felt roof and added that on top.

Whew.   

The fruits of my labors. My hands are cramping just thinking about all the time I spent on these bad boys. But really, it wouldn't have been so bad if I had just been making ONE. Since I ended up doing four (one for my folks, each sibling, and one, of course, for us) I may have developed carpal tunnel in the process.

One of the four calendars I actually did in a silver/blue color scheme because my sister decorates for Christmas in all blues and silvers.Trav confessed that he liked this one better than ours, but oh well. He got a red and green one.

If your curious, here's how that one turned out. Even though I don't have a final picture - just image this all with the pockets sewn on with white thread and a grey roof (like the others).

some detail.

So there you have it. The reason I have not blogged, read much, and kept my house cleaning to a minimum over the past two months. I'm pretty excited over how they all turned out - I think the real reason I love making Christmas gifts is because you have all this time while you are actually putting the thing together to think about the person you are making them for. It's a nice way to keep your family in mind during the holidays - especially for me when mine all live so far away.

As a side note, because of all my preparations, I got into the Christmas spirit very, very early this year and have been singing Christmas songs to Petey since early November (which I usually NEVER do before Thanksgiving). I'm thinking it's not necessarily a bad thing ;)

Now I just need to come up with 25 activities for each pocket....