Better late than never: Advent calendar!

The countdown to Christmas has now OFFICIALLY begun, despite the Coca Cola advert being aired on ITV nearly a month ago and triggering a mad, premature rush into Christmas. I almost can't quite believe it's December. Apart from being so mild for this time of year - I honestly saw a tree on my road with pink blossom on its branches this morning, what is going on with the weather!?! - where have the past 12 months gone? It only feels like a couple of months ago, at most, that Jim and I were choosing last year's advent calendar - it was a toss up between Winnie the Pooh and Toy Story. Oh decisions decisions...

Anyway, to save on such brain-aching dilemmas this year, a week ago I (optimistically) told Jim I would make him an advent calendar. So, using an old cork notice board, and delving into my box of fabric offcuts, I managed to pull together a few festive looking materials that I could cut, sew and glue into something resembling a 24-pocketed, chocolate-filled wall hanging.

All you need to undertake a similar project (probably best saved til this time next year now!) is:

• A cork board (mine was about 30x50cm and slightly on the small side if I'm honest)
• Drawing pins
• PVA glue
• Various bits of festive-coloured fabric and felt
• Ribbons, sequins and other decorations
• Pencil, paper, scissors, needle, pins and thread
• Chocolates!

I started by hemming a large stripey piece of fabric after pinning it in place with 4 drawing pins, so that it fitted exactly on the cork part of the board, inside the wooden frame (modelled by Ted the dog):

I then cut out 24 squares, using a paper template, from white and red felt to use as the pockets, after making sure they would all fit on the backing fabric.

Next, I drew several Christmassy templates onto paper and used these to cut out 24 shapes from scraps of fabric.

I positioned all the pieces of fabric on the cork board to make sure it all fitted before sewing/gluing anything in place (again, modelled by Ted):

Happy with this, I used some everyday PVA glue to stick the shapes securely onto the red and white squares. While waiting for these to dry I carefully pencilled in the numbers of the calendar onto the top right corner of each square to make sure they were all a similar size, before sewing over the pencil with black thread:

Next, to add a bit of detail I glued on a few red beads as berries on the holly shapes, some tiny gold stars onto the top of the christmas trees, and sewed some thin ribbon onto the present shapes:

All that was left to do was to fix everything together: starting with the main stripey piece of fabric I sewed the hem using the sewing machine, and then pinned all the squares in place, before sewing round the sides and bottom of them to make 24 pockets:

Finally, fill each pocket with some (preferably non-melting) chocolates and sweets and let the count-down begin!!