It’s been a really long time since my last Advent / Holiday / Christmas / Fun Times Countdown calendar. As a kid, I used to get the standard grocery store calendar with itty bitty chocolates inside, and that was enough to thrill me. Sure, the chocolates always tasted like rubbish and more often than not, I either forgot to open a new door each day, or, I’d eat a whole bunch ahead of time, but it was still a fun treat and holiday activity to have at home.
This year, I toyed with the idea of putting together my own calendar with treats and activities that are a little bit more fun and personalized. This idea mostly struck me during a trip to IKEA where I ran into this guy:
Cute, right?! Each box is actually rather deep and the whole package makes for a pretty neat reusable calendar. I was almost sold. I had him in my hands as I perused the other Christmas decor items, thinking about all of the things I’d stuff the boxes with. Then, I put him down and walked away. I’m sure it was all very much like the IKEA lamp commercial in that he sadly watched me walk away all heartbroken and wondering what he had done wrong to be abandoned like that.
Obviously, poor Santa there didn’t do anything wrong at all. I merely had a change of heart at the last second and was suddenly sitting on the fence of do I or don’t I go ahead with making up a calendar.
Eventually, the answer became do, when I decided to get a little crafty and make my own… out of a canvas… and envelopes…
We have loads of canvases sitting around. I do intend to ultimately get around to painting all of them one day, but for now, they sit around, collecting dust and cat hair along their edges. It’s a rough and tough life for a canvas in this household.
With my canvas calendar idea blossoming in my mind, I grabbed one at random one night and applied gesso to it in preparation for the fancy business he would soon become. I made absolutely no considerations of size or anything. I was going about this in a very haphazard kind of way, hoping that flying by the seat of my pants would be enough to get this done. After all, don’t the best ideas just sort of… happen?
The next morning, I grabbed the green painters tape and began marking off squares on the canvas, all in a variety of sizes. I wasn’t much too interested in making this an equal piece, what so ever.
With the tape down, I moved on to painting the red squares first, followed by the green. Again, I wasn’t really digging the everything looks the same business, and opted for varying shades of both colours. The variations ended up a bit more … various than I was anticipating, but it still looked (and continues to look) neat, in its own way.
Once my lovely greens and reds were dry, I peeled up the tape and stared in disgust at what lay before me. The streaky, white lines of gesso in between all of the blocks looked awful. Of course, I never intended to leave those areas white, and had decided to fill in those areas with silver. Should I have maybe painted the whole canvas silver first and THEN applied the colour blocks? Probably, but I do certainly like to do things backwards. It provides that much more of a challenge, you know? (Or that’s what flying by the seat of your pants gets you, either way).
With the painting portion of the canvas complete – I finished up by added black lines around each square which you’ll see in a later photo – it was time to move onto making the envelopes for the goodies. I had some smaller envelopes laying around that I thought would suffice, but needless to say, did not. They were entirely too big and so, I scoured the internet for envelope tutorials.
Now, forgive me, because the actual blog I found the above template on, I didn’t bookmark, and now, cannot pass along my thanks via blog post. In lieu of that missing link, here is another link to a variety of envelope templates.
I enlisted the help of a friend to make the required 25 coin envelopes. Really, it didn’t take us all that long, and following our envelope adventure, had quite a giggle over many ridiculous Mad Libs. Gosh, I love Mad Libs.
I used a roll of kraft paper that I picked up at IKEA for one whole dollar to make all of the envelopes. I figured the kraft paper would be the best, neutral match to the otherwise colour heavy canvas. Sure, we could have gone white, but where is the fun in a whole pile of standard white envelopes?
Then, I got stuck. I got really, really stuck on how to adhere the envelopes. At first, I wasn’t too concerned with making the calendar reusable. I figured, hey, we’ll use it this year, have some fun with it, and then do something else with the canvas again. Then, I changed my mind. Go figure.
My initial thought was to glue the envelopes to each square on the board with rubber cement, removing them as the month went on, and possibly, damaging the canvas as well.
The glue idea wasn’t sitting well with me and so, I started trying to come up with better ideas for displaying the envelopes without physically attaching them to the canvas. I came across some ideas on Pinterest that featured hanging the envelopes on rows of string, but that idea definitely looked like it only worked well for its specific application (an Advent calendar in an old frame, I think it was).
Finally, I had my eureka and duh moment: magnets!
I picked up a cheap sheet of magnets from the dollar store and, as good as they’re making out so far, I will certainly want to look into getting magnets that are little more sturdy and stronger next year. Conveniently, they have adhesive backs, but they’re not sticking to the canvas all that well, and so, I still need to glue each one of them on to ensure that they stay. I say that in the present tense because I’m still gluing them on, one by one, as they fall off the canvas. Talking about proactive behaviour, am I right? None of this do it all at once business for me.
What’s inside each envelope, then? Itty bitty paper cards. The envelopes are small and the magnets weak. That combination results in me being completely unable to actually stuff the envelopes with anything bigger or heavier than a business card size piece of card stock.
That doesn’t mean the contents are in any way less fun and/or fulfilling. There’s a variety of everything from mushy quotes, to favourite memories we’ve shared, to Christmas activities for us to do together, to treat hunts…
See, because I couldn’t actually put treats inside each envelope, I had to come up with an alternative plan. That plan became a treat hunt for 9 different sweets hidden all over the house. Each card has a photo of the package in question as well as a clue as to where it might be found.
This whole treat hunt idea was not part of the initial plan at all, and was definitely a last minute addition once I realised that there was absolutely no way that even the lightest candy would hang securely from the calendar. I like how that part of it came together though and is now, simply, another fun activity in the grand scheme of activities.
There it is. Completed with the black lines around each square as mentioned above and envelopes with numbers printed on simple mailing labels to tidy it up a bit. I originally wrote the numbers by hand but didn’t love it at all. I wasn’t really sure about using the mailing labels, but, in the end, actually like how the white around each number just makes them pop that much more. Previously, the black ink directly on the kraft paper made each number nearly disappear, which was not super ideal.
Fancy. Look at that fancy business.
And yes, a few envelopes are flipped vertically. Ignore those. I have no idea what happened to them. I took the photo above this one earlier in the day and then test hung the canvas downstairs to make sure everything was good, only to, well, have it fall later on that day and the magnets… re-polarize? It was the strangest thing, but now they will only attach if vertical, not horizontal.
I could flip the magnets, but the ones on the canvas have already been glued and feel like they’re there for life now. The ones on the envelopes are threatening to rip the envelopes apart.
I opted to just leave those three oddballs as they are. It makes them look like they contain something even more special than the rest…
Except for that’s a lie. A big, flithy lie.
