Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Advent Stockings!

I really wanted to do something special for an advent calendar. I wanted to have fun little candy gifts instead of the lame chocolate that always comes with the store bought calendars. I found this idea over at Burdastyle.com and I knew that I just had to try it! I bought the fabric and ribbon on Etsy and the numbers are actually American Crafts vinyl Thickers!

Since I am sewing machine illiterate, it took me a million years to actually finish these. If I knew what I was doing, it would have taken me a lot less time. However, I am thrilled with the outcome! The stairs are in my breakfast nook, so this is the perfect little area for the kids to have some fun Christmas things just for them! I also have a little tree for them with their 12 Days of Christmas gifts.

I filled the stockings with Hershey's kisses, candy canes and other little candies. Once they have their treat, we take the stocking down. Maddux loves counting the stockings so that he knows when Santa is coming.

My friend Patrizzia did a super cute advent calendar using mittens. I love that all of the mittens are different. Such a cute project!

Do you have an advent calendar? Do you use something unique to count down the days until Christmas? I would love to hear about it!!

7 comments:

Carmen O. said...

For some reason your pictures aren't fully showing up. But from what I can see these are FANTASTIC! It's so great that you have an awesome place to hang them as well. Your children will have many great memories for Christmases to come!

PS I looked at our Krogers for Andes mint candies and nada! :( Hopefully I can find some at Target. I plan on making them for a cookie exchange at our Christmas which is this coming Sat! Thanks for sharing all your wonderful recipes and creative ideas!

shopgirlaudi said...

Your advent calendar is SO cute. I LOVE the colors:)

I bought one at World Market cause I wanted to alter it, but it's kind of cute the way it is, so now I'm thinking of doing something else.

I bought Hershey's Kisses and I "moved" the chocolates around that were already in there so that there was one piece of each of my two kids in the little boxes.

I saw these really cute stocking ornaments at Big Lots that I wanted to buy to make like a stocking garland one like yours or I saw this really cool idea where they used the Cricut cart (Tags, Bags, Boxes...) to make little shopping bags and make a garland type using those. It was really cute too.

Lal said...

OMGoodness, that is just too freaking cute!! I want to do that, but I really have no place to hang anything like that! I love the mitten idea too. I'll have to check out Patrizzia's blog to see it. You asked how I got those pics of Mikey in front of the tree. Well, I don't know the settings on your camera so I'm just going to tell you what I did. I set my camera to the AUTO setting and then in that setting, if I hit the MENU button, it gave me an option to change my ISO. So really, that is what you want to do. So if you know how to change your ISO, then you want to do that. And I just put it at the highest setting my camera has which was 400 and left the flash off. That's all I did. I hope it works for you and I can't wait to see YOUR pics :)

Patrizzia said...

Oh Estee how freakin' fun are those. They came out wonderful!!! For someone who does not sew I think you did a fantastic job!!! I love all the different tops of the stockings... the funky fabric is fab! Great job sista friend!

The Dolphin Inn said...

Th the cutest advent idea I have seen this year Estee - love it TFS XXX

Estee said...

Thank you for all of the nice comments!!

Lal - I am going to try and take some new pictures once I figure out my new camera!! :) Thanks for the tips!

Amanda Sevall said...

I LOVE this!! So stinkin CUTE! Great fabric :) We don't do an advent calendar (no kiddos around here!), but I will keep this in mind for future Christmas traditions - so much fun!