Do you give your furbaby Advent calendar snacks each Advent? I noticed Trader Joe’s selling dog and cat Advent calendars in November a few years ago and usually purchase that one for my dog. Since then I’ve been wanting to make my own prettier calendar, something I could put my own treats in if I chose.
Design Used
After looking at a number of different designs, I settled on Amy Sinibaldi’s “Easy DIY Advent Calendar”. Unfortunately, the EHow link that is linked to in her post is no longer working. Thankfully I found it was archived at Wayback Machine and you can still access her instructions and pdf template there. I only used the numbers, and for some reason I put off hand embroidering the numbers for a long time. The rest of the project went together very quickly!
Changes Made
I made this with just two fabrics, some fusible quilt batting and a tiny bit of fusible webbing for the bone applique on the big pocket for Christmas Day. I traced a cookie cutter for the shape.
Instead of ribbon ties I made hanging corner pockets for a dowel or piece of flat molding (a cut off yard stick would work too!). They are super easy to make; just cut 2 squares that have sides equal to 1/3 the length of the thing you want to hang, and fold them on the diagonal before tacking the cut edges to the top corners. For this project I cut 7″ squares.
For the pockets, instead of binding the top I used the Christmas plaid fabric to bind and flatline the pockets at the same time. To do this, I cut the lining a half inch taller than the pockets, and then used that excess to bind the top of the pockets. You can find a tutorial of this technique with photos, used for clothing construction here. Using this technique protects the back of the embroidery on the pockets by lining them and gives the pockets a tiny bit of extra structure over just binding the raw edge.
While I am really late this year with finishing this Advent Calendar, I’m so glad that this will be ready for next year! Have you made an Advent Calendar before? There are so many ways to DIY one and Amy’s was very easy to make!
