2012 Advent calendar

I wanted to create an Advent calendar for you this year.

I've been seeing this on some of my favourite craft blogs for a while now, but you were too young for it last year. I went to the dollar store last week to pick up all the supplies. I got all the boxes made and mounted on foam core last Wednesday while you were in daycare. Then, I was able to finish all the activities and surprises for you that are in each of the boxes today (again, while you were at daycare). We will be starting the opening of the boxes on December 1st and I'm so excited for you to look forward to each day leading up to Christmas. I'll be documenting each day so look out for that!

I bought a pack of heavy stock paper at the dollar store. I chose this pack because it included
all these colours in the pack and I got the idea to do an ombré effect for the boxes.
I always get inspiration when I go to craft stores and dollar stores because I'll look at what
they have in stock and then I immediately think of ideas on how I can execute something.

I found several templates online of boxes that I liked. I printed it out on regular plain paper
to test out how they would look. This is the pattern that ended up working for me. I redrew it
on Adobe InDesign to fit my paper and then printed out 5 copies for each coloured paper.

It was a tedious process. I had to score all the lines that were dotted and then cut out the
box shape with my exact-o knife.

Here is the box after I put it all together.

I used these cute glitter and rhinestone number stickers that I found at the dollar store to
label all the boxes.

Like the ombré effect?

Here are the boxes mounted on the foam core.

Next I made a template to make all the activity tags to go inside some of the boxes. I
had a label punch that I measured out the height/width so that I spaced out all the activities
evenly on my design program.

Here's a close-up of some of the activities.

See what I mean by spacing it out?

I punched a hole near the top of the tag so that I could tie a white ribbon on it.

Here are all the tags made :-)

Kendall was watching me the whole time I was working on this.

Here's all the activities that we will be doing in the coming days.
You can see that most of these items would not have fit inside the boxes. That is why I had
to make activity tags for each one.

I stuffed each box with the activity tags.

Here's day 1's activity.

Some of the boxes don't have tags. Instead I stuffed them with candies/chocolate and even
little toys like this.