Our 2013 Advent Calendar & Linky Party

Hello there! How is your week going so far? Mother Nature cannot decide what weather we should be experiencing here and has been all over the place this past week.

My goal this week is to share some of my complete Christmas projects with you and today I wanted to share our 2013 Advent Calendar! If you can remember from my 10 Festive Tutorials Post, this was one of the projects that I wanted to try! So here is my interpretation of the Envelope Advent Calendar.  

What You Need to Make this Advent Calendar:

• Glitter Card Stock in your colors of choice
• Circle Label Stickers
• Scissors
• Pencil
• Corner Rounder
• Ruler
• Super Sticky Tape
• Paper Folding Tool
• Hole Punch 
• Ribbon

To Make Your Envelopes: 

For this calendar, I ended up making me envelops from scratch by following this tutorial.  I do not have the Envelop Punch Board system though, so I had to draw the lines and do all of the cutting by hand.  

To start, cut out 6"x 6" square pieces of paper.  Once the envelop is finished you will end up with a roughly 3.5"x 3.5" envelop.  I wanted them to be a consistent size, so I made sure to cut all of the squares in equal sizes.

Step 1: Measure 2.75" from each end of the square and draw a small dash with your pencil.  These will be used as a reference point when you go to draw your lines for the folding

Step 2: Connect the dots! Use a ruler to draw straight lines connecting the opposite dashes to each other.  When you're finished, your square should look something like the picture in square 2.

Step 3: Cut out your triangles you created when connecting your dots.  By doing this, you are creating the flaps of your envelop

Step 4 (Optional): Use your corner rounder to round the corners of your envelop.  This adds a smoother feel when the envelop is all closed up.

Once you have your envelop cut and corner rounded, take a paper folding tool and trace along the lines on your paper.  If you do not have a paper folding tool, the blunt side of a butter knife works perfectly.  Again, I used my ruler to get straight lines on my envelop.

Fold your envelop on the lines you just created and stick three of your sides down to create the envelop.

Making the Envelop Inserts:

Using your leftover card stock from the envelopes, cut rectangles out to use as your inserts.  In order to have room to hole punch the envelopes, I made my inserts 3" x 3.5" and hand wrote all of our activities on the non-glittered size of the envelopes.

You can see a few of my ideas on the cards in the picture below.  A few of our events are specifically geared to events we have planned in the month of December because we otherwise would not have time to do anything that day.  Luckily, almost all of these events are Christmas centered so they fit perfectly with the theme.

After I my cards were written out, I took time to hole punch my envelopes to get ready to string them with the ribbon.  This part was a bit strange for me because I needed to hole punch the bottom of the envelop in order for it to hang properly.  Each envelope received two holes in the bottom which I strung the ribbon through: back to front then front to back.  

After all of the envelopes were strung to the ribbon, I made the stickers myself.  Originally I wanted to buy some of the thickers like the one in the original tutorial but I could not find them anywhere and opted to do them myself.  I used PicMonkey to get the font idea then hand drew each number for each tag.  They ended up turning out pretty cute and I think I may use this font for other crafts in the future.

The last step in the process was to put the stickers on my envelopes and hang it up on the wall! If you're lucky, the stickers will hold the envelop flap shut all by themselves, but if by some chance they do not stick well (due to the glitter paper) this is where you can use your super sticky tape to hold the envelopes shut.

That is my 2013 Advent Calendar! I cannot wait to try some of the fun things on the calendar and I cannot wait to share them with you!

Do you have a fun advent calendar you'd like to share? 

Make sure to share it with us through the Linky Party!