naturally meg...: Wooden advent calendar...

I've been wanting to make an advent calendar for the boy for a few years now. So I've been keeping my eye out for some good ideas, there are so many cute ones out there! But none of them were exactly what I was looking for. So I combined a few different ideas and came up with this wooden tree advent calendar.

I used this tutorial as my guide for the wooden tree. We used the sticks that fenced off our garden this summer for all the branches. Then I got some match boxes (I found them at Smith's) for each day. With all the extra matches I made some of these.

I would have loved to have covered them all in brown craft paper, but my husband said that was too boring. So I found some other fun paper at Michael's. I went with a stripe and some holly berries.

To hang them on the branches I got some fishing line and poked two little holes in the top of the smaller box with a quilting needle. Then I looped the fishing line inside.

Instead of tying them I just put a dab of hot glue to hold the line in place and snipped off the ends.
This worked perfectly!

Sorry, no pictures of actually putting the branches together. I sawed them using a jigsaw and sanded down the edges so that they were smooth. I tried to leave some of the edges that have been weathered outside for a more rustic look. I found this perfect star at Target. Such a good find! And then I glued it on the tree crooked... so I'll have to fix that later.

The tutorial for the tree says to use string to hold all the pieces together. We used an unbent metal hanger instead. This way we can bend it around so that the tree lays fairly flat. Plus it gave us a loop at the top to hang the tree on the wall.

I used number stamps to put the dates on all the boxes. I also decorated some of the boxes. Not all of them, but some got a special little trinket on the outside. Here are some of my favorites...

There is our lovely advent calendar. I'm so excited to start using it tomorrow! The boy is even more excited. I want to focus on making memories this season instead of just getting "stuff". So inside each box I'm going to put an activity that we can do for that day. To get the slip of paper out you just slide the box like this.