DIY Advent Calendar

I have been getting so excited for Christmas. I love Christmas. I love doing Christmasy things and decorating and baking and buying gifts!!! And I am excited for my first Christmas as a married woman. I wanted to make sure we had a special and memorable Christmas season so I decided to make an Advent Calendar with lots of fun activities to make sure we actually did things rather than just talk about it.

I used my mom's die cut machine and her cardstock to make the red and green tags. Then I used her Cricut machine to make the numbers and a snowflake punch. I used adhesive dots to attach the numbers and snowflakes onto the tags. I came up with the advent activities on my own, if you would like the list, leave me a comment and I would be happy to email it to you. To make the activity cards, I used several different free Christmasy fonts that I found from these two blogs: We Lived Happily Ever After and Over the Big Moon. Here are all the tags and activity cards before I put them together. I used glue dots to stick the cards onto the backs of the tags. I looked at our calendars to decide when to do easier activities and when we would have time for more involved ones.

The next step was to spray paint 24 clothespins. I was going to use these to hold the tags on ribbon. I used Krylon Gloss Cherry Red and gave them 2 coats.

Next I got my hot glue gun and a jar of multi-colored and multi-sized buttons that I found at Walmart.

I hot-glued the buttons onto the tops of the clothespins in various arrangements.

Hanging the tags onto the ribbon. I used 2 lengths of ribbon, each 3 1/2 feet long and hung 12 tags on each.

All the tags are hung! Let the festivities begin. (P.S. notice the entry way table...will post soon about finishing that project)

This Advent Calendar is linked up at Positively Splendid.