Advent Calendars - AKA Adhesive Mayhem

So a few months back, my sister-in-law pinned this cute thing on Pinterest. Like an idiot, I told her I would make her one in exchange for her talking up my blog. Well you'd better get on it Emily, because these things were an obnoxious pain to make. Why do I always volunteer myself for extra work?!

I finished one last night and the other this evening in between watching Netflix and talking with Collin on Google Talk. (He is up working on shift about 5 hours away until Sunday afternoon. Darian and I will be spending Thanksgiving with my family tomorrow and we'll have our Thanksgiving next week.)

They turned out pretty cute, but were wrought with disaster. Ok...maybe not disaster...how about hiccups.

FYI...my house is not photogenic. I really need to stop doing these posts at night. The lighting is horrible. Don't judge my photo skills. I really do know how to work my camera.

Each pocket has a day of the month from the first of December until Christmas Eve. In each pocket is a 3 1/2" x 5" card with a winter or Christmas activity for the family.

So obviously I made a few changes from the original example. Hopefully Emily still thinks hers is cute. I originally wanted to use tan posterboard, but apparently that is too much to ask for. No one carries tan. My choices were white, some random neon colors or a gold/silver reversible option. Dumb. So I went with white. I cut each posterboard to 22x22".

I used a nice pile of Christmas paper that I happen to have laying around (the bonuses of having a scrapbook room full of random supplies). I cut each pocket to a 4 1/2" x6" size. I then adhered decorations and numbers. This took a little work because while I seem to have many, many chipboard and sticker alphabets I appear to have very few numbers. There was some tension during that part of the process.

I then stuck the pockets to the posterboard. My advent calendar will be the one on the left. Why? Because I'm an adhesive moron and my glue was too wide, making my activity cards extraordinarily snug in their pockets. There was a LOT of cursing last night as I tried to slide them in. Thankfully I was smarter with the second one and those babies move in and out like clockwork. (As a side note, I also went through two - TWO - rolls of Tombo adhesive to make these things. Not cool.)

I took some of the activity ideas from the original example, but then supplemented some options with my own. Also, since I had the white posterboard instead of the tan, I didn't want to do white cards. So I did half in red and half in green. So Christmasy. There's no set day for each activity so they can be shuffled into whatever order you like. There's also the possibility of adding new activities/traditions as the years go by. Don't worry...I saved the template. :)

Once I had the pockets and tags all assembled, I attached the pieces. I did this by taping strips of ribbon to the backs of the pieces. I also added a top handle with another ribbon. The ends are slung through punches in the posterboard and secured with large brads. I'm thinking that a modification to the taping at the middle may be needed as the years go by. I may add some small brad attachments in that area as well to keep things more secure. We'll see how it goes.

So that puts another two projects in the finished pile. I'll be taking Emily's to her tomorrow at Thanksgiving dinner. Happy Thanksgiving to everyone and I'll be back on Friday with another post...though I have no idea yet what that will be about. Yay for spontaneity!