So my friend Victoria sent me a text this week asking if I would assist her with a Holiday themed project. I obviously couldn’t say no, for multiple reasons, one it being Holiday themed, two the fact that she is one of my best friends, and Vickie’s projects usually involve paper. I can never resist a good paper project.
“I want to make an advent calendar” she stated in her text. So my first thought was oh no! this may involve chocolate. My only holiday memory involving an advent calendar was getting a shipment from my Grandma around the end of November, and like any child every year I had not a clue what she could possible be sending us in the mail….obviously a chocolate filled advent calendar. Thank god she wasn’t cheap and used her motherly instincts she also sent one for my brother and another for my sister, because we obviously each needed our own piece of chocolate before breakfast every single morning in the month of December.
A call after work hours cleared the whole chocolate part up. She wanted to create an advent calendar using envelopes with holiday “tasks” for a family to complete (obviously a lot healthier then chocolate before breakfast, let alone every day). She wanted to showcase a fun way to use envelopes for the holidays. We spoke about it every day for the rest of the week, and then came today….go time!
I raided my home stash, and pre cut Vinyl numbers, she had the envelopes we needed, and then came one of my favorite parts…shopping! We went to the local craft store, luckily getting everything we needed in one stop. Anticipating to use a coupon on our “VERY BIG” purchase, a frame that needed to be at least 17″x 22″, we were pleased to find that there were doorbuster sales, making the 24″ x 36″ frame 70% off, costing only $14.99!
Luckily with weekend crafting a glass of wine is allowed (not that I won’t do it on a weeknight every now and then). So after only one glass of wine, no major crafting accidents, and a few hours this rather large advent calendar was complete!
I promised myself if I ever started a blog, in which I guess I decided to do 🙂 I would not list every little detail of the project and give every single step in chronological order. Why? Well if you read this and decided you want to take on creating your own advent calendar it should be YOUR OWN. I want this to inspire you to create, if you wanted yours to look exactly like mine you might as well just go to the store and buy one. The fun about crafting is that it has your own touches, and own ideas. Also it would suck all of the fun out of it if I gave you the steps one by one, the best part about crafting is planning out your ideas and problem solving.
MATERIALS:
- A Frame
- Printed Poster Board/ Paper
- Bag of Mini Clothes Pins
- Ribbon
- Cut Vinyl/ Stickers/ Markers
- #17 Mini Envelopes http://www.envelopes.com
- #17 Mini Flat Note Cards http://www.envelopes.com
TOOLS:
- Scissors
- Hot Glue Gun
- Ruler/Tape Measure
- Spray Adhesive
- Straight Edge
- Exacto
- Tape
- Thin Ribbon/ String
- Wine 🙂 (Optional of course)
Unfortunately the paper that we fell in love with wasn’t big enough for our frame, so it had to be seamed. Keep in mind, you can always cut your paper with a straight edge to make your patterns match up. When pulling the paper from the rack in the store I made sure to get two pieces which matched up with out me having to cut them just to make it slightly easier.
If you look closely you can see we taped the seam of the paper from the back so that when we laid it down after we sprayed the glue we did not have to worry about matching it up. Also notice the hanging hardware on the back piece of MDF of the frame. We mounted the paper directly to it. In this step it may not matter but always keep note where your hardware is when laying out your calendar. Make sure everything is mounted in the correct orientation to match up which way you are going to hang it.
The next part needed a little bit of thought and calculation. I took this part on while Vickie got do the fun stuff like sticking the numbers on the envelopes (which could also be hand written) and writing out family friendly holiday ideas to fill each envelope with. I guess I partook in that slightly while we exchanged ideas for things that families can do together to enjoy the holidays. We obviously also exchanged a few good laughs.
Originally I was going to measure out each of the clothes pins correct home and place a small pencil dot where it belonged. For some reason I thought it may be easier to use ribbon to make a grid. With most of my projects I try to figure out the best way to overcome challenges with repetitive tasks. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t 
. I think this one was a winner. I measured out the space I had to place the envelopes, the size of the envelopes with the clothes pin, and with some basic mathematics, some thin ribbon, a ruler and scotch tape stuck to the counter the grid was born. A line of hot glue on the back of each clothes pin and now we are getting somewhere.
You will soon come to learn that this would not have been a Tis A Season creation if it didn’t have some ribbon on it. Let’s be real that not everything needs ribbon, but what can I say, I have a problem. So this may have been the most tedious part of the project, but I think added that extra charm it needed.
Twenty four hand tied bows, it could be worse, and it has been, so it was doable. You can also use the fork tying bow method, which if you have not seen it already it can be easily googled. Which I did try one that way, but it was way to perfect, which was the look I thought I was going for….but it wasn’t.
We placed the whole thing back into the frame, we hot glued the bows on and “pined” in all of the envelopes. As soon as the frame went on and that first envelope got put into its place it took on a whole new look and really brought it all together. 
IF I DID IT AGAIN:
We chose the foiled poster board cause we really liked the print, but if I did it again I probably would have found paper large enough to fit the frame with out having to seam it, most likely wrapping paper. The seam stands out more in the photos then it does in person, but me being me it will bother me every time I look at it.
tisaseason.com 