Homemade Advent Calender

When I was growing up, we had a felt advent calender that consisted of pockets under a Christmas tree. It had the sweetest little wood vintage ornaments and we always loved taking the ornament out of the days pocket and putting it on the tree.
I wanted to do something similar for my kids, so this is what my mom and I came up with.

Last year we hit up Hobby Lobby when their Christmas stuff was 90% off. They had a few of these wall hangings that we decided would make a great top scene for over the pocket portion of an advent calender. I think we paid $2.
Of course, even though we bought it a year ago, it didn't get pulled out and worked on until about Thanksgiving.

The original wall hanging scene had some fabric "curtains" on the sides and top to make it look like a stage. We decided to take those off because they were a bit much.

We cut two rectangles of matching maroon felt large enough for the scene to fit on with space underneath for the rows of pockets.

Then we cut strips for the pockets with enough space to sew along the bottom of each row and then turn it up so there was a finished edge along the bottom of the pockets.

We then added some rickrack along the top of each row of pockets. This was an addition that was thought of in the moment and would have been easier if we had sewn the rickrack along the top edge first.

After the rickrack, we flipped the pockets up and pressed them and then marked lines of where to sew vertically along each row to form the pockets. I believe that my mom drew the lines on tear away interfacing, put those on top of the felt rows, and then sewed right on the lines. This ensured straight lines and no marks on the felt (which is hard to mark- especially if it's a dark color like maroon).

Once the pockets were sewn, we took the other rectangle of felt and put the right sides together and sewed all the way around, minus an opening for turning. After it was turned, we pressed and top stitched it.

My mom folded a portion of the top over to hold a dowel and glued on pre-cut felt numbers that she bought from a seller on Etsy.



The tree part kind of went the same. To make the background for the tree we sewed two pieced of felt together (right sides together) and then turned, pressed, and top stitched. I think we threw a layer of interfacing in so that there was more stability once it was hanging.

We started out with enlarging a tree coloring page that we like. We pinned that on to the felt and cut it out. Our original advent only had a single layer felt for the tree, but I wanted more dimension, so I drew in some swoops and cut out each portion in felt and glued them on to the base layer of felt for the tree. We used tacky glue to glue the felt on.

We decided that it's much easier for little people to put ornaments on with velcro on them instead of safety pinning them (my childhood advent was pins). We laid out ornaments first to make sure the spacing of them was all okay, but I thought it looked a little bare.
I remembered that I had bought a big package of Christmas buttons at Joann's, so we pulled those out and found all of the littlest stars and placed those around on the tree as well. Much better!



We bought a couple of packages of mini ornaments from Joann's and some clear velcro dots. We glued the dots onto both the tree and the ornaments. We used a different kind of glue, but I don't remember the name of it. It was more permanent than the tacky glue.

The final step was putting a dowel and cord on the top. I never got around to actually buying a dowel though and just stuck a stick from our yard in there which worked great!

My 5 year old absolutely loved pulling an ornament out of the day's pocket and picking a spot to put it on the tree. He was very orderly about it so we had the bottom of the tree filled first and then the top and then he filled in the middle (usually all in a row).

This was a fairly simple project, but did still take time to do. I'm excited that we'll have something that will be around for the whole of children's childhood!