Advent Calendar {Re-Post}

Last year I joined Jill in a sew along to make an awesome advent calendar.  It was a ton of work and I barely finished in time but I've been so happy to have it this year.  Every day I pull a chair up to the calendar (I didn't want it within little hands) and Catie climbs up and hangs an ornament; it was the perfect year to start the tradition.  Also, everyday as she pulls out a new ornament I'm impressed with how great they look and I'm glad I took the time to hand sew them all.

I thought I'd re-post my advent so you can take a look, sorry if you've seen it before.

December 1st and my Advent Calendar is finished!  When I started this sew along with Jill I didn't realize just what I was getting myself into, every singe stitch on this calendar is sewn by hand making everything take significantly longer than I had anticipated.  Every time I pulled out a different project my calendar loomed over me.  I'm glad to say that it's finished, I love it and I'm now free to work on other projects.

As a quick recap, week 1  we cut out and embroidered all of our numbers and sewed them onto the backing piece.  Week two we cut and sewed the tree on and made 8 ornaments.  Week three we made 8 more ornaments and then sewed all of our buttons onto the tree.  This last week we finished the calendar which involved finishing up the last 8 ornaments, sewing a backing piece on the calendar to hide all those stitches and adding a hanger.  You're supposed to slip a wooden dowel into the holder on top but I haven't bothered to pick one up so it may be finished but there's now way to hang it.  Oops.

Here it is with the ornaments hung.

And with them all tucked in their pockets.

Here's a close up of the ornaments.

And one more close up of the finished calendar.

Jill has a Flickr group where people can link up their Calendars so if you want to see more you can go here.

Advent Calendar - Week #4 (Final)

December 1st and my Advent Calendar is finished!  When I started this sew along with Jill I didn't realize just what I was getting myself into, every singe stitch on this calendar is sewn by hand making everything take significantly longer than I had anticipated.  Every time I pulled out a different project my calendar loomed over me.  I'm glad to say that it's finished, I love it and I'm now free to work on other projects.

As a quick recap, week 1  we cut out and embroidered all of our numbers and sewed them onto the backing piece.  Week two we cut and sewed the tree on and made 8 ornaments.  Week three we made 8 more ornaments and then sewed all of our buttons onto the tree.  This last week we finished the calendar which involved finishing up the last 8 ornaments, sewing a backing piece on the calendar to hide all those stitches and adding a hanger.  You're supposed to slip a wooden dowel into the holder on top but I haven't bothered to pick one up so it may be finished but there's now way to hang it.  Oops.

Here it is with the ornaments hung.

And with them all tucked in their pockets.

Here's a close up of the ornaments.

And one more close up of the finished calendar.

Jill has a Flickr group where people can link up their Calendars so if you want to see more you can go here.

Advent Calendar - Week #3

Time for my Advent Calendar update.  If you're new to the blog then I'm doing a sew along with Jill and we're all making this super cute advent calendar by Inchmark Journal.  Each week Jill gives us a new assignment and so far we're on week 3.  The first week we cut out and embroidered all of our numbers and sewed them onto the backing piece.   Week two we cut and sewed the tree on and made 8 ornaments.  At least we were supposed to, I thought the assignment was only 5 so at the last minute I managed to come up with two more but was still one behind this week.  Our week three assignment was to sew on our buttons and make 8 more ornaments, or in my case 9.

Here's mine looks like after week three.

See all those loops sticking out of the pockets?  those are finished ornaments, 17 of them to be exact.  So not only did I catch up my one last week but I made an extra one this week.

Here are the two I made to catch up last week but didn't post about.  They were both easy just to get me almost caught up.

And here are my 10 new ornaments.

I think Santa's my favorite.

An up close of the partially decorated tree.

Come back next week to see my progress.

Advent Calendar - Week #2

I just looked up Jill's site to find a link to remind you all of this sew along advent calendar that I'm making and noticed that my assignment this week was 8 ornaments, not 5 like I thought.  So now I'm 3 short.  I may or may not make three more, we'll see if this post gets updated.

Week two went okay, I felt really behind but managed to complete the assignment with time to spare (or so I thought).

Last week I embroidered all of my numbers and sewed them onto my backing piece.  This week I cut out my tree and sewed it on.

A quick side note... don't you hate how the second time you do a project you end up so much happier with it than you were the first time?  I want this advent calendar to be my second attempt because I'm already doing things I wish I could change.  I wish my tree could be taller but I'm limited by to the size of the rectangle I cut out.  It'll work but there are things I would change if I could.

So I cut out and sewed on my tree.

Then I made 5 ornaments

You'll notice that lots of them are white but that's because I was so busy with the car seat that I started a bit late, meaning I chose easy ornaments.  They happened to mostly be white, I will add some colour though.

Here's a close up of the individual ornaments.

He sure is a sad snow man hey?  Not sure how that happened.

Hopefully next week goes okay even though I plan on tackling the high chair re-cover.

Advent Calendar - Week #1

So I've mentioned it a couple times but I'm sewing with along with Jill to make this adorable Advent calendar by Inchmark Journal.

Jill gives us an assignment every Wednesday and we show our progress until we all have the above, adorable calendar, just in time for December 1st.

This week she tasked us with cutting out our main backing piece, cutting and embroidering our felt squares and sewing the squares onto the backing.  I started this project a couple days late so I felt like I was rushing and would never finish in time but surprisingly completed it all by yesterday early afternoon.

I started by going to Fabricland and picking up this beautiful selection of felt.

In the past I've used dollar store felt but I decided I want this project to last so I should use better materials.  I also really wanted to use real wool felt but who can afford that stuff?

Then I worked on my numbers and here's the tricky part.  Inchmark Journal gives a really handy tutorial on how to transfer your number temlates to the felt using an iron-on transfer pencil.  I went to pick one up at Fabricland where the employee there told me that crayons work too, I'm always looking to save a buck or two so I skipped the pencil and learned that crayons really don't work, unless there's a trick I don't know.

It was late and I wanted to start so I got creative.  I traced all of my numbers onto freezer paper and ironed them onto my squares.  Since they're a mirrored image I ironed them onto the back of my felt and stitched through the paper, the paper side being the back.  I'll make that more clear with photos.

Here is my square of felt with the freezer paper ironed onto the back, see how my number is backwards?

Once I did my stitching I really carefully pulled off my paper and it looked like this, still looking at the back.

Once flipped over it looked like so...

I used a chain stitch to do all 24 of my numbers.

Once that was done I laid my squares out on my backing piece, that I'd previously cut.  I made a handy grid on PowerPoint to help me line my squares up nice and straight.  I slipped it behind the backing piece and the squares showed through so I knew where to pin.

Once I'd pinned 9 or so, (that was as many as my grid would let me do since we don't have bigger paper) I stitched them on.  I repeated that process a couple times until all of my numbers were stitched.

So here is my end result for this week.

So far I'm thrilled with how it's turning out and I'm excited to see what our assignment is for this week.