DIY Advent Calendar

It’s almost December and I’ve been thinking about Christmas a lot; wanting to make our Christmas more meaningful this year and be really purposeful about focusing on Jesus’ birth instead of what presents we’re going to get or the goodies we’ll eat or events we’ll go to.

I thought a good way to make sure we spend at least a few minutes every day thinking about Jesus and talking about him and how he came to earth to save us from our sins is to make an Advent Calendar. We’ve never done an advent calendar before, but we are going to this year!

Advent simply means, “coming” and to celebrate Advent is to celebrate the coming of Jesus into the world; opening a door or envelope or present each day for the 24 days preceding Christmas.

There are a lot of advent calendars and there are so many options of what you can do, it’s almost overwhelming!

I decided to go with a simple felt calendar, that we can use year after year without having to go to a lot of work making it.
I also used printables from some other fabulous blogs for the numbers, the Bible verses to go into the pockets and an activity to do each day. (more on that in a second.)

Wanna make your own Simple Advent Calendar?

Of course, feel free to adapt your felt to whatever color scheme that matches your home/decorating for Christmas.

I figured red and gray and white is pretty Christmasy.
Let’s do it!

You need:

1- 14″ wide x 18″ tall rectangle of white felt

5 -11″wide x 3″ tall strips of coordinating felt (for pockets)

1- 1″ wide x 18″ long strip of white felt for the hanger

Sewing Machine

Coordinating thread

Scissors

25 clothespins

Printables  for the day numbers, bible verses and/or fun activities

Or you can just make your own little cards if you’re so inclined. I’m not, so I just googled around til I found what I wanted.

I got my day numbers from  Shanty-2-Chic, the Bible verses from Happy Home Fairy, and the fun activities from  Plum Adorable.  Pinterest has a TON of free printables too, if you can’t find just what you’re looking for.

Now that you have all your supplies, let’s make the calendar.

Take your white felt and line up your colored strips so that all 5 fit evenly spaced on the rectangle. I took some white felt  and sewed 2 smaller pieces together to make a nice rectangle. I only had scraps of felt and thankfully I had enough to piece together a big enough shape to hold the strips of maroon and gray felt for the pockets.

The felt kind of sticks to itself, so you may not even need to pin anything if you handle it carefully!

Sew down the ends of all the strips- just one big long stitch through all five, ending just past the bottom of the last strip. Do this on both sides.

Then, sew along the bottoms of all of the strips.

DON’T sew the tops!!! You’ll close up your pockets. ONLY sew the bottoms.

Once you have your bottoms sewed, go ahead and make 5 evenly spaced pockets on each row. Mark with pins.

Sew slowly and carefully, making sure it’s in a straight line, all the way down across all the strips, just like you did on the edges. As you can see, mine is not perfectly straight. That’s okay. I did cut the felt around the edges to be a little more even after I took this picture. Thankfully felt doesn’t unravel, so you don’t have to worry about hemming anything!

Finally, take your skinny white strip of felt and sew the ends down on the top corners of the calendar to create a way to hang it up.

Good. The main part of the calendar is done!!

If you want, you could applique numbers onto the strips before you sew them on the calendar….but I thought of that after I’d already sewed the strips on. So I just used clothespins with numbers glued on them for the days leading up to Christmas.

Cut out your numbers, and glue them to the clothespins, cut out your Bible verses and your activities and place one verse and one activity in each pocket, clip the clothespins on the pockets and then hang up your Advent Calendar!

I’m so excited to start using it in a few days!

 

 

Shared at Frugal Days, Sustainable Ways