Countdown To Christmas

I think this year our granddaughter is finally old enough to enjoy an advent calendar. This might sound crazy but I've been wanting to make an advent calendar for many years now but never did because I had no one to gift it to. The Christmas after our granddaughter was born, I got excited just thinking  that I would only have to wait a few more Christmases before I would have a reason to make one.

After all the years waiting, I already had imagined exactly how I wanted my first advent calendar to look, using Kaisercraft's beautiful Beyond The Page Square Shadowbox chipboard advent calendar as the base. So you can imagine my disappointment this summer when I couldn't find the Kaisercraft calendar base for the shadowbox anywhere except from one seller on Etsy who wanted to charge $30 for shipping! Instead, I ended up buying this Karen Foster 3D Peek-A-Box from Amazon despite the very poor reviews on it, simply because it was the only affordable one I could find.

First thing I did was change the orientation of the calendar from portrait to landscape by turning it to its side and flipping the drawers inside. I liked that the calendar was large (14" x 9.5"), but just as the reviews from previous buyers had warned, it was poorly constructed and I ended up having to take much of it apart to re-glue everything securely.

Next the fun part... I found several Hello Kitty Christmas coloring pages online that I liked and had Make the Cut design program render them into paper piecing cutting files to decorate both the outside and inside cover. Difficult to tell from the photos but I used lots of different glitter and pearlescent cardstocks to give everything a festive sparkle. Snowflakes were cut from Taylored Expressions Little Bits Snowflake Confetti die, and the cutting file for the title was created from Tabitha and Cupid fonts.You may also have noticed that I ended up completely covering up the window on the front cover of the calendar.

This is what it looks like inside...

I paper pieced another Hello Kitty Christmas scene from coloring book images for the inside cover. The drawers were covered with fun and whimsical Doodlebug Christmas papers by using a template created in Make the Cut design program and cutting on the Silhouette. Congo font was used to cut the greetings on the inside cover and Memo font for the numbers on the drawers.

In the end, I was happy with the final outcome, despite the poor quality of the original calendar base. One thing I should mention that I neglected to take into consideration before starting this project was the size of the individual drawers. It turns out that the size of the drawers on this Karen Foster advent calendar (2" x 2") is larger than most of the others, which is a good thing. This was a significant factor especially when trying to find goodies small enough to fit into the drawers (that are not candy!) and yet safe enough for a 2-1/2 year old toddler. I filled the drawers with mini cannisters of play doh, stickers, washable tattoos, bubbles, animal shaped erasers and finger puppets.
Hoping our granddaughter will have as much fun counting down the days till Christmas on this advent calendar as I had putting it together for her.