Homemade Advent

I have always wanted a Christmas Advent calendar. I wanted the really cool ones with boxes that pull out and all that. Once I saw the prices for them, I immediately went to Pinterest to find a homemade version of what I liked. I found several but I didn't want to spend any money. I wanted to use things I already had but wanted it to be super cute and fit our family. SOOO.....the kids and I got working today on making our very first Advent Calendar. I thought I'd share how it all turned out. Here's how cute it is:

It was exactly what I wanted and fits us just right: not perfect but perfect to us. I started out by finding an old chalkboard in the garage and painted the frame part brown and put a cream color all over the chalkboard part to help the colored cards stand out. These were paints I already had.

Then I moved on to making the string for cards to hang on with clothespins and also had the kids paint the clothespins the same brown as the frame. The string I used was string Katelyn had with some of her jewelry making things and I just tied them onto thumbtacks to make my "little clothesline".

The kids loved helping paint the clothespins. I had clothespins left over from a project we did awhile ago so I just pulled those out.

 Then we got our cards cut out and began decorating each one. I used to scrapbook a lot so I have a ton of paper, die cuts, stickers, etc. They ended up looking very cute and I also have cool cutting tools so it made them nice and even.

After the cards for each day were all decorated I made little activities we would do on that day to go under each one. This was the fun part because I got to think of cool things we could do and also got some ideas from the list off the blog that I was following for this. Here are some of the things we'll be doing:

THAT'S IT!!! Once I got those done, we hung each one with a clothespin and this very cute and fun Advent Calendar cost me NOTHING!!! I am so excited to start tomorrow and even more excited to start this as a family tradition each year!

Here's the Blog I pulled our ideas from:
http://www.thriftyandthriving.com/2012/11/christmas-countdown-advent-activity-calendar-homemade-holiday-2012/