Today we celebrated first of advent and it was really nice! We went to church, decorated ginger bread, lit the first candle on our advent wreath ....
(By the way, anybody any idea how one could present those flat huge gingerbread house cookies? I tried to put them on a table that they would stand up - leaning on the wall. Result - they simply break! They are really soft! I find it sad to just eat them ... they look so cute ...)
I also managed to finish the advent calendar for my daughter on time! YEAH! Even one day early - i managed to finish it yesterday evening! :-) I just love it and think it looks great.
I saw some advent calendars like that in online shops and really liked the idea. I found a really great instruction for such a calendar here.
As you can see in the picture I changed some things a bit and used the instruction rather as a guideline. But without it it would have been much harder to do ... and taken much more time I guess ... so thanks Cathy for the great instruction and the nice pictures!
It was actually quite some work and I had to do it all by hand. Since the big red felt was too thick to use the sewing machine ...
I don't even wanna get started on the velcro bits. I would have never been able to sew them on. My husband had to do it. I simply couldn't manage to get the needle through the velcro bit ... So I am not intending to use velcro in my sewing soon again! ;-)
I hope the calendar will last a really long time!!!
Here is a picture of it without the ornaments:
Here is a picture of all the ornaments:
And finally a picture of the tree with the ornaments on it:
There are supposed to be 24 little pockets under the tree where the ornaments are. You take one oranemnt each day out of the pocket and put it on the tree. I didn't bother sewing the pockets yet. Might do it next year. This year the ornaments are just in a big stocking ...
I submitted this post as my "Favourite post of 2008" to Tip Junkie.
4 comments:
Thanks for linking to my instructions! It's great to see how your calendar turned out. I'll be making two more calendars for friends this year and you've given me some ideas for different ornaments - I was never really fond of using the letters in "NOEL" in my calendar but I ran out of ornament ideas. Merry Christmas! :)
I'm glad that I could give you some ideas, too! :-) I actually quite liked the "Noel". But I live in Germany - and most people here don't know what "Noel" means! Well, and of course my 3year old daughter doesn't really care for any letters yet ... ;-)That's why I had to search for other stuff. But I actually didn't find it that easy to come up with things that are easy to cut out in that small size! The reindeer and snowflake were quite a challenge! :-)
This is so cute, I love how it turned out and it'll be such a special decoration to take out and use each year. I wanted to make one this year but found all the work daunting, now I'm encouraged. Maybe if I begin in July on it, LOL!
Well, yeah ... it is quite a lot of work. But I actually enjoyed it a lot. I just started a bit late (as always) and therefore had to hurry.
After making it I realized you could probably make a similar calendar without all the sewing and work - I saw some made out of wood. You could probably buy a wooden tree (one you use for decoration) in the right size and put 24 ornaments on it! You could sew the ornaments, cut them out of cardboard or felt, or even buy tiny real ornaments and use those. You would only have to find something how you get them to HANG at the tree. You could even buy one of those miniature trees in a pot and put ornaments on this one. But of course you couldn't keep it for the next year. ;-)You could also use a magnetic board and magnets ... Well, there are quite a few more possibilities. I don't know why I always realize this AFTER I made something?! :-)
Ulli
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