Every year, from Halloween to New Year, life is a whirlwind of activities, events and marathon eating on repeat.  With a kid, our schedules are even more packed.  You parents know what I’m talking about.  Our kids have more active social lives than we do.  I have a backlog of things that I want to share, but unfortunately, I just don’t have time right now.

Over the last month, I was away for a week because we surprised our daughter with a trip to Disney World.  That was an awesome experience by the way.  After we returned, I had to get ready for Thanksgiving festivities.  In between all the craziness, I was cranking out a huge project every moment I could spare.  And by huge, I mean physically, and also the magnitude of the details involved and time spent on it.

I wanted to make my daughter an Advent calendar.  Not just any Advent calendar that’s slapped together in an hour.  If I was going to put my time, effort, and money into this project, then it was going to be beautiful and freaking heirloom material.  Go big or go home.  And f’ing big I went.

Most people with lives would not spend 12748 hours on this project.  As my husband can tell you, I spent nearly every free moment cutting, sewing, and gluing.  Want dinner?  Eat some peanuts and string cheese.  Laundry?  Yeah…I’ve already done 6 loads since yesterday, and I probably have 2 more left.  This project can be made a lot faster if you skip most of the sewing, and just hot glue everything together.  Also, if you are not interested in a huge 4’x3′ calendar, the ornaments themselves would give your Christmas tree a really sweet and homey touch.  Most of the ornaments are only one sided though.  If I had 2 more weeks than I would have made them double sided.

Use very sharp scissors.  My scissors were recently sharpened before I started this project.  Now, my scissors are in desperate need of another sharpening.  I could tell when they started to dull because they would snip off more than I intended, and the cuts were not as clean.

You can find step by step instructions on how to make the calendar here.  The ornaments are split into part 1 and part 2.  Scroll down and you can see closeups of the ornaments since it is hard to see the details on the tree photo.