Thursday, December 2, 2010

25 Days of Christmas: Advent Calendar

Happy Thursday! Only 23 days until Christmas! Can y'all believe it's almost Christmastime? I most certainly can't. We got our Christmas tree last night, and as soon as I smelled the fresh piney scent of the tree lot, I knew Christmas had arrived. It seems like just yesterday I was complaining because it didn't get out of the 60's all summer.. haha!

Anyways, today I'm sharing an advent calendar. At first, I was going to just add daily Christmas activities to the backs of my fridge m
agnets, but I started looking through galleries and was inspired. I wanted to get a pre-made, plain advent calendar to alter. Of course, my M's let me down again. They didn't even have small trinket boxes that I could use for it. I ended up using toilet paper rolls cut into thirds.
A little bit of paint disguised the toilet paper rolls pretty well, I think. I used a 2" circle punch to make the circles, and they fit nearly perfect over the rolls. The book pages are slightly inked on the edges, but the rest of the distressing is natural. I got lucky a few months ago and found an old 1950's encyclopedia at Goodwill for $1. It makes the perfect accents! I used modge podge to stick them to the toilet paper rolls and to stick the toilet paper rolls to the burlap (yes, I'm STILL stuck on burlap. I have a ton of it left, too!). I weaved a painted dowel through the top and added some modge podge to get it to stay. And lastly, I put some bells on the ribbon and tied the ribbon to the dowel. And voila! A homemade advent calendar comprised of things that I already had around the house and in my stash. Well, all except for the jingle bells. They are 40% off at M's this week though, and I thought that was a good enough deal.

I'm pretty proud of it.. mostly of how cheap and easy it was. :)
-Dani

3 comments:

OhioDanielle said...

Wow! What a creative way to reuse toilet paper rolls. I love how you used an encyclopedia and modge podge! Great job!

Unknown said...

I would have never guess those were toilet paper rolls.

Kalena and Justin said...

I have to agree with all the others, I couldnt tell they were TP rolls I thought maybe cups of some kind. But I have to ask, is there candy behind those days?