DIY contemporary Christmas advent calendar

Last Christmas I loved our DIY copper advent calendar that I’d made the previous year so much I decided I didn’t need a new one. But this week I got the craft itch, and I felt a little festive, so I’ve made this contemporary advent calendar out of a cheap hanging organiser I got a while back from Ikea. An Ikea hack and a homemade advent calendar in one hit.. not bad, eh? Making the calendar also prompted me to plan out our advent activities for December. It’s become a family tradition for our advent calendar to contain a little festive activity every day of advent rather than a sweet, and the twins are already getting excited about all the activities they’ll find in our calendar this year. If you want to use ours as a guide, you can download my free PDF of our 2016 advent activities. Or of course, there’s nothing wrong with just popping a sweet or chocolate in each day’s envelope instead.

This advent calendar is very easy to make. You will need:
* IKEA Komplement multi-use hanger
* Small parcel tags
* Marble sticky back plastic
* Motex label maker (but you could write the numbers in pen instead)
* Small glassine bags

1. Stick a small (around 1cm) strip of the marble sticky black plastic to the bottom of 24 parcel tags.

2. Use the Motex label maker to print numbers 1-24.

3. Press each number onto the centre of a parcel tag.

4. Double check you have the right number of finished tags (spot the odd one out because I didn’t have enough of my chosen tags!)

5. Write each advent activities on a piece of card or paper no wider than the width of the glassine bags.

6. Pop the written card into a bag, fold the top down almost in half and punch a hole top centre.

7. For each day, loop the parcel tag string through the glassine bag so they’re tied together (check the number and activity match up).

8. Tie the bags to the top of each loop in the multi-use hanger. Make sure to mix the numbers up – finding them each day is half the fun!

I added a few sprigs of eucyalptus along the top of my calendar for a bit of festive greenery. I also fancy the idea of hanging some baubles or something with a bit of sparkle from the bottom hoops, so I may do this in the run up to Christmas. And of course, I had to see how it looked on my black living room wall as well as the white one. Which do you prefer?