December Craft Challenge - Advent Calendar

I am so excited to participate in Heidi's Craft Challenge this month. The theme is Christmas and since I already had plans to make an advent calendar, I thought that would be a good craft to make for the challenge.

Initially I was going to do a traditional calendar with something for each day, but I ran out of ideas. So, I decided to have a weekly countdown to Christmas. I was inspired by this tutorial and tweeked it to my simplified calendar. So, the idea is that each week (on Sunday because that is our family day) we'll go over the activities that we'll do for that week. Here are some things we are going to do:

Watch How the Grinch Stole Christmas (we did this Monday...a day early)

Go to the zoo and see the Christmas lights

Drink hot chocolate

Make Jesus a birthday card

Put up our Christmas decorations

Make Christmas cookies

Watch the Charlie Brown Christmas Special (December 8)

Drive around and see the lights in our neighborhood

Read about Jesus' birth

So for the calendar I used paper mache boxes that will hold the list of that week's activities. I traced the lid and applied some festive scrapbook paper using Mod Podge (gotta love that stuff).

Here's one box with the paper glued to the lid. Then I used my Cricut and cut out the numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4 for each week. **I can tell that I do my crafting at night because there's always mood lighting in my pictures.

I cut out 25 squares from scrapbook paper and then mounted them on cardstock. I used my Cricut again to cut out the numbers for each square.

I made the 25 square slightly bigger and used scrapbook paper that says Merry Christmas.

Finally, I made a heading, glued everything to a canvas and then added some embellishments.

I am thrilled with the result even though I realize that I will only be able to use this for this year...still worth it.