Tuesday, November 17, 2009

A Christmas Pleaser for Sure!!

I am a woman who loves the Lord our God with my heart, soul, mind, strength. I delight in celebrating the things He does everyday and knowing He will be there when I need to call! I thank Him for His wonderful gift in Jesus! I adore Christmas and all that it brings (minus the commercialism)!! To celebrate the birth of my Savior is just wonderful. I love all the senses one engages during the Christmas season......smells of cinnamon, hot chocolate, cookies; sights of all the decorations, especially the lights!; sounds of all the awesome songs.... I personally could do Christmas songs all year!!; I could just go on and on! The one thing that really sticks out to me from when I was a kid was waiting to get my advent calendar for the official kick off to the season! I absolutely LOVED when my mom and dad would get me the store bought calendar with the little perforated windows that fold back to reveal a little chocolate. Now, you have to remember I do not like chocolate, so I exchanged these tasty morsels to my dad for other candy and change. I have carried this on with my own kids and now DH even gets in on the action and loves his. Well, lemme just tell you my eyes almost popped outta my head when I saw a beautiful handcrafted scrappy advent calendar in the Holidays magazine by Scrapbook Trends. The project in the mag was done by Elisa Giffin.

This is my recreation of her project:


Holy Advent Calendar, huh?? I thought initially this would be a huge, time consuming project to do; it actually went rather quickly since I cut and prepared all the papers in advance.

So, I know you are just itchin' to know how to do this, right??
Supplies Needed: 16x20 canvas (in the mag it is a stretched canvas on a wooden frame and I used a flat one from WalMart that was MUCH cheaper), wedding favor tins (I purchased mine from Michael's.... be sure to use a coupon, you can get them sent to you via email), card stock, patterned papers, 2 inch circle punch, bellies, and number and letter stickers.

Here's what to do:
I like to do all the prep work first so I am listing what I did in the order I did it in.... do what works for you!!

Cut 12x12 cardstock into 3x12 inch strips to create top border.

Cut rest of cardstock into 24 - 3x3 squares.

Cut a alternate color of 12x12 card stock, or patterned paper if you like, into 2 5/8 x 12 inch strips.

Cut patterned papers into 24- 2 5/8 x 2 5/8 squares.

Using your 2 inch circle punch, punch 24 circles out of patterned papers.

Cut thin strips for the wedding favor tins..... I know they had to be 7 inches long to go around with a bit of overlap, but I don't know what the exact measure is for the width.... it just worked out perfectly on my trimmer on the silver part.

Line it up and glue it down! I eyeballed mine... but you could use rulers to create the grid too.

Adhere the punched circles to the tops of the tins with a glue dot.

Embellish your heart out!!

Add numbers and your lettering for Days til' Christmas and voila!!!! You have one awesome advent calendar.



This is going to be DSs. He thinks it's really cool and is glad he won't have to deal with the chocolates anymore like I did!!! LOL!!! Apparently I passed that dislike on to him!



DD has requested that her and her daddy have a more girly calendar! She looked through my papers and decided on some non-traditional Christmas papers and she wants me to incorporate penguins somehow!!



Thanks for looking at my project.... if you make one leave a link so we can all be inspired!

1 comment:

  1. I am so pleased you are another Sister in Christ...and you love to paper craft! Makes me happy!

    This project is AMAZING! I love the colors and everything. You are very talented!

    ReplyDelete

Thanks for sweet words - they mean so much to me!!