Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Tree Advent Calendar




I have yet another Advent Calendar to show you.  This one didn't take as long to make as some of my others (if you want to see a couple of the other ones you can see the Sleeps 'til Christmas Countdown here or you can see the Christmas Village Calendar here).  The idea came from Family Fun Magazine.  It's one of those magazines that started showing up in my mailbox.  I tend to put it in the car for light reading while I'm waiting in the car pool line.  Have I mentioned how much I'm starting to hate the car pool line?

Here is the link to the the Family Fun Magazine.  They have a template you can download but... what fun would that be.  For one thing, I don't like sitting around cutting 24 of these cones out with my scissors.  For another, I found that their cones weren't actually even in shape so I didn't like the way they worked.  So, Cricut to the rescue.  Using SCAL I traced a circle divided into 3 equal parts.  Here is a screen shot of my SCAL mat to cut the cones.
This was fairly easy to find in PDF form.  I then clicked on the keep proportions and resized it for the different sized trees.  I made the circle from 10 inches down to 6 inches.

Here are the circles and the numbers

You wouldn't want to cut this as it looks here.  If you did that the circle becomes too flimsy.  I used a marker on the numbers and cut the circles.  That means I hid the circles like this:
Then I put my marker in my E and pushed the scissors.  It then drew the numbers onto the paper.  Then I hid the numbers and showed the circles.  Like this:
Here is a close-up of one of the trees. 
And finally, I made the last cone the biggest.  It has the star on it and will have a slightly larger present than the other days, maybe a very small book.  All the other days I'm planning on rolling up a piece of paper with the name of a Christmas book.  Then, each night the Wonderkid find the appropriate tree and gets to see which book we'll read that night. 
I used Perfect Pearls on the star.  I really do love those Perfect Pearls.  I love the sparkle and they are so easy to use.  I have a tiny 1 1/2 inch Xyron which I put the stars into.  When they came out they had enough adhesive to hold the pearls.   Then I used a Glue Dot to stick the two stars to a skewer. 
Here is a side view of a tree.  You can see the pop dots I used for each of the numbered circles.
Now I only need to cut out another 15 sets (by my calculations, that means 360 cones and 360 circles).  The good news is I'm making them for an Advent Festival so I won't need to put them together. 

1 comment:

jsellers50 said...

Those are really cute. You did a great job on all three items.