So I try to make one new crafty Christmas thing a year, and this year I decided to make advent calendars for Adam and me. I actually bought the felt last year after seeing this super cute tutorial on The Purl Bee, but I never got around to making them. This year I did, and since it’s Christmas Eve I thought I’d post the finished results.

The red one is mine, the white is Adam’s. The felt yardage for the backing is just from JoAnn, and the felt for the pockets is recycled felt (from plastic bottles!) from Felt-O-Rama. I changed a few things to make my calendars, though. I used my AccuQuilt Go! (thank you from last Christmas, John and Joyce!) to make the squares, so my pockets were 2.5″ squares on 4.5″ pockets.

I also experimented a ton with my Cricut until I figured out how to cut the numbers out that way, too. I cannot embroider to save my life, and I decided this was not the time for a crash course. So after much swearing and stress, I found that the super stiff felt you buy at Michael’s or AC Moore works perfectly in the Cricut. Regular felt, regular felt with spray starch, regular felt with stabilizer fused on, sticky felt, and fabric all do not work so well for this project. Stiff felt sheets are absolutely perfect, and it took me 2 sheets to make all the numbers. Also, I used the Opposites Attract cartridge for the numbers. The other fonts I had were just too thin to cut out properly, that one had a fat enough option to get really perfect numbers.

Once I got the hang of what I was doing, the pockets came together really easily.

I kind of loved this project, and I love that we’ve been revealing little treats in our calendars all month (okay, since the 12th–which is when I actually finished these!)