One More Advent Calendar

I purchased this Advent Calendar file from SVGCuts.com.  It can be purchased here.  I need to start this post off with a couple of observations.  I did a LOT of Advent Calendars this year, five in total.  Three of them I designed myself and two of them I "bought".  The first was the Christmas Village Cartridge from Provo Craft.  I normally find that purchasing something from Provo Craft (the maker of all the Cricut "stuff") is the easier way to do things.  The cuts all fit together easily and they tend to be very straight forward. 

Christmas Village was not that way.  You can see my Bethlehem Village here.  There were virtually no "directions" on how to make it fit together.  You had two villages on one cart (the Middle Eastern/Bethlehem Village and the Victorian Village) and you had a bunch of boxes but no real idea about where they fit, what size they should be or how many you needed.  It is a nice cartridge but it isn't intuitive like most of their carts and thus not easy to use.  I think Robotz was similar but at least with that one you had everything you needed on one key and could work it out fairly quickly.  That wasn't the case on Christmas Village.  My other complaint about the cart is all of the figures have been made to stand up.  If you want to put them on a scrapbook page, they will have a slit along the bottom.  If Provo Craft would change the slit just a little, it could be hidden in Design Studio or with the Gypsy and then the uses multiply. Please, don't take this a slam against Provo Craft.  I love my carts and I love using SCAL.  Sometimes one is a better fit for what I want to do, sometimes another. 

As tough as Christmas Village was, SVGCuts Advent Calendar was a breeze. They have a 15 minute tutorial online so you can watch one being put together.  I think that made it more likely I would buy the file but it wasn't actually necessary once you started cutting the pieces out.

The bottom of the calendar is a plain square.  If you don't change any of the dimensions (which you don't need to when importing it into SCAL) it will be 11.5 inches square.  I made mine black.

Here are all of the pieces.  The top 4 are the ones for the outer edge.  The remainder of the pieces are the edges of each box. 

As you can see, each box wall has the number on it so you can put it in the correct place on the calendar face. I had three sheets of 12 x 12 cardstock for the inner boxes alone.  I must say these were very easy to fold, barely needed my bone folder and certainly didn't need my score board. 

Here is a close-up of the bottom left corner.  I love all the details.  The directions describe the doors as 3 shades of green, two shades of red and white for most of the numbers.  After doing this once, I would probably do more of them in solid shades and then emboss some, stamp some and decorate them in other ways. 

Some of the boxes are fairly wide.  It is easy to put a lip gloss in at least 4 of them.  You could also fit things the size of 3 or 4 tea bags (as you can see in #19 here).  I made gift tags to put inside #21 since that should be early enough that they can still be used this year. 

These are some of the doors before I inked the edges and attached them to the appropriate doors.

This is the white glitter cardstock I used for the numbers.  I was able to put one set of numbers on half a piece of 12 x 12 cardstock.

These are the two stacks I used for this project.  The black was Recollections cardstock from Micheals.  All of the other papers were from DCWV.

 

I inked all of the edges with ColorBox.   I hope you like my final Advent Calendar of the year.  I must say, I had a couple of ideas for additional calendars which I hope to make for next year.  One would be using some of the Tim Holtz ideas to do tags on a big ring with a very grunge feel to it.  I'm thinking it would be great for one of my 20 something brothers.  

Thank you for looking at my latest creation.  I hope you have enjoyed it or at least learned something.