Hello, hello my friends!
If you’re in the US, I hope you had a lovely Thanksgiving weekend to kick off the holiday season. Mine was quiet and very low-key, which is exactly how I like my my celebrations, especially celebrations about gratitude.
One of the things I’ve been working on over the long weekend is the annual Advent Calendar. It’s going to go on top of the piano, and this tradition is a much beloved one in our family. As I was cutting and assembling, I realized that this will be my 10th Advent Calendar. 10 years!! Isn’t that mind-boggling? As always, I’ve listed all the calendars I’ve made to date at the bottom.
It’s always a challenge to come up with a different concept, and this year I designed a bunch of patterns, then I folded them into triangular boxes (I followed the tutorial from here, but made my own template of quatrefoil shapes). Aren’t the patterns cute? Can you find the boba tea and volleyball ones? You can tell that I had a lot of fun trying to make them holiday-esque! I created about 30 designs total but obviously only used 25, and tried to include a few motifs that represent K’s favorite things. I had a “doh!” moment, however, when I noticed that I forgot to include a music-related pattern. Music is at the top of her favorite things list! That and true crime podcasts, which I also didn’t include. What would I have drawn? Knives and blood and dead people? Crime tape?
So I started by cutting out the shape…
Then folded in the “petal” edges…
Then folded each triangle inward to create the square base…
Added the filling and punched a hole in each petal tip…
Threaded a cord through and attached a little circular label (for the countdown numbers 1-25)….
And voila!
I was especially proud of the idea of including a puzzle piece every day. I got one of those DIY puzzles from an art store and painted it with watercolors. I love that she’ll be able to slowly put together the puzzle throughout the month.
Fun, right?
Here they are…adorable triangular gift boxes, ready to be opened (sorry for the image quality — I was rapidly losing natural light):
Every year I like to offer up some free printable holiday tags for YOU, and realized that I could simply reduce the size of the quatrefoil shapes into sweet little tags. You know how much I love tags! If you’d like to download some tags from years past, scroll down after the list of Advent Calendars.
For this year I selected 12 of the designs that felt more generally appropriate (you probably don’t want a volleyball themed tag, right?) and arranged them onto one sheet as tags. Click on the image or here to download the file. I recommend printing them on card stock or textured paper like my go-to Inkjet paper for best results.
I’m so excited for K to see the calendar tomorrow morning (December 1st)! That’s the most thrilling moment for me: when she wakes up and beholds the whole shabang.
By the way, if you’re subscribed to receive blog posts by email, I’ve switched email services and will be sending the blog posts from a different email address (sanae[at]sanaeishida.com), so you may find the blog updates in your promotions tab or in your spam folder. Please have a look there if you notice that you haven’t been getting updates from me. Thank you!!!
Oh, and here are the past Advent Calendars:
And here are tags from years past for your convenience if you’d like more options:
Amazing! Your creativity is so inspiring.
Aw, thank you, Molly! I love thinking up a different calendar every year! 🙂
Thank you for sharing your talent! I wish your tags printed double sided who that your name appeared on the back for credit.
Have a lovely Christmas!
Oh that’s so sweet of you,Cheryl! Thank you! I hope you enjoy the tags :).
Thank you for the ideas and the free artwork/tags. I printed some tags today. I love them, and am inspired by your work! Thank you!!!