Advent calendar

I know, I know I have been MIA for too long but truth to tell I haven’t done a huge amount of crafting lately. Our home is up for sale and we have been busy either keeping the house up to scratch or keeping the garden tidy. Then there was all the accumulated junk to sort through and dispose of.  Then joy of joys we had an offer for our property and we had to hot foot it down to Cornwall to house hunt and luckily found a lovely bungalow with a sea view, we put in an offer which was accepted and back home to do yet more sorting ut whilst all the paperwork was being processed. I then started to pack those things that were not going to be used within the next month or so. Two months down the line our buyer pulled out and the world seemed to crash down around our ears! So it is back to housework to keep the place looking loved and tidy but our estate agents, bless ‘em, are pulling out all the stops and we have plenty of viewings lined up – fingers crossed we will soon find another buyer who will keep their word.

And so to crafting! Every year our grandchildren are bought advent calendars especially the ones filled with chocolates and it came to mind why didn’t I make them? Sara at Cardmaking Paradise had created a lovely advent calendar based on the sour cream carton (for those of us of a certain age in the UK they look similar to the Jubbly cartons of our childhood!!) so I unearthed all my Christmas papers that I rarely used for card making and proceeded to make 96 little cartons (24 per child!). These I filled with small sweets/chocolates.

Little cartons filled with chocolates and sweets

A very kind forum friend, Marion from Cardmaking Paradise forum sent me her crimper, I used this to ‘ribble’ the ends of the little cartons which gave a lovely professional finish to them. Initially I was going to use die cut numbers on punched out circles but adhering lots of die cut numbers to small circles was a step too far and I printed out the numbers and used a small circle punch to cut those numbers out and stamped a small image on each circle and adhered these to circles of cardstock. Thread was fixed to the small cartons and then to a numbered circle.

Using another template supplied by Sara the outer, larger, cartons were made from plain cardstock for the base and printed pearlescent paper for the outer covering. Each of the larger cartons was filled with 24 small cartons but before filling with the smaller cartons I adhered large chocolate coins to the internal base so that there is something for 25 th December!

showing the larger cartons filled with smaller cartons

The images on the paper used for the outer covers of the larger box were already on my computer, the images were printed onto the gold pearlescent paper. I added extra decoration by using a border punch along the top edge of the large carton.

Another view!

These were great fun to make and add something special to the lead up to Christmas. I’m already coming up with different ideas for next year!!

Please join us at Cardmaking Paradise where there are lots of lovely templates, not only will you join a very friendly crafting community but a donation from your membership is made to Sara’s charity Crafty Smiles bringing crafting to children in hospital.

Thank you for looking x

 

 

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