DIY contemporary Christmas advent calendar

DIY contemporary Christmas advent calendar | Growing Spaces

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

DIY contemporary Christmas advent calendar | Growing Spaces1. Stick a small (around 1cm) strip of the marble sticky black plastic to the bottom of 24 parcel tags.

DIY contemporary Christmas advent calendar | Growing Spaces2. Use the Motex label maker to print numbers 1-24.

DIY contemporary Christmas advent calendar | Growing Spaces3. Press each number onto the centre of a parcel tag.

DIY contemporary Christmas advent calendar | Growing Spaces4. 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!)

DIY contemporary Christmas advent calendar | Growing Spaces5. Write each advent activities on a piece of card or paper no wider than the width of the glassine bags.

DIY contemporary Christmas advent calendar | Growing Spaces6. Pop the written card into a bag, fold the top down almost in half and punch a hole top centre.

DIY contemporary Christmas advent calendar | Growing Spaces7. For each day, loop the parcel tag string through the glassine bag so they’re tied together (check the number and activity match up).

DIY contemporary Christmas advent calendar | Growing Spaces8. 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!

DIY contemporary Christmas advent calendar | Growing Spaces

DIY contemporary Christmas advent calendar | Growing Spaces

DIY contemporary Christmas advent calendar | Growing Spaces
DIY contemporary Christmas advent calendar | Growing Spaces

DIY contemporary Christmas advent calendar | Growing Spaces

DIY contemporary Christmas advent calendar | Growing Spaces

DIY contemporary Christmas advent calendar | Growing Spaces

DIY contemporary Christmas advent calendar | Growing Spaces

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?

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1 Comment

  1. November 14, 2016 / 4:29 pm

    Hello from Blogtacular! Great idea! One of my favourite times of the year is making Advent calendars for everyone. And I love repurposing things from Ikea – I cut up a white komplement hanger and made the rings in to dream catchers 🙂

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