Advent Calendar Craft-Along {Finished}

Time for an update on the Advent Calendar Craft-Along. (See the introduction post here, or the last update here).

I finished, and just in the nick of time! I finished hand-stitching the binding before making dinner on 1st December, just in time to hand the first decoration!

After my last update, the end was in sight and I felt really motivated to finish this project. The decorations were looking good, and I had 7 more to finish. Unfortunately, some of these were the more detailed ones (which I’d been putting off), like the angel:

And the snowman (I decided not to bother with arms for this year!):

Two sprigs of holly were also made – I love the sparkle of the sequins:

And the second bell was finished off too:

I found two sequinned bows in my stash (leftover from the Ribbons and Remnants challenge), so I cheated and turned them into decorations instead of making the strings of lights. My tree was running out of space anyway!

I laid out the decorations and worked out where I need to sew the buttons. I decided to use green buttons rather than colourful ones as I wanted the tree to look bare to start with (but I did use a plain star for the top of the tree – I don’t know why, it was just cute!).

I marked the place for the buttons with chalk and hand-sewed them all into place.

I was originally going to embroidery “Handmade by Mummy, 2014” on the back, but my embroidery skills aren’t the best and I was running out of time. So I backed it with a chevron print in Christmas colours, using a polyester wadding so the print didn’t show through. Then I added the cute candy-cane striped binding.

I created a pocket for a dowel to slide through to hand the advent calendar using the bias binding, sewing it into the binding.

And now we have a cute advent calendar to count down the days until Christmas!

I didn’t quite square it off properly, so it’s a little wonky, but I’m so happy with how it turned out!

What type of advent calendar are you using this year?