Felt Tree Advent Calendar

I jumped on another bandwagon this year, the Advent Calendar.  I've been wanting to make one
 for about 2 years now and never could decide how I wanted it to look or what I wanted to make it from, cardstock, felt, fabric, etc.  Last year I saw this advent on Homemade By Jill and thought it was perfect.  I had grand plans of starting way early and creating all these really intricate and beautiful felt ornaments for Grant to place on the tree each day.  Then reality hit and November came to a close and I was scrambling to get them all done.  I'm really proud of the ornaments I made.  I didn't really follow any patterns because I think felt can be difficult to work with when you're cutting small intricate shapes, so I freehanded the majority of all the pieces.

I did look to google for inspiration by googling "felt advent tree calendar" and "felt ornaments".  If I saw something I liked I saved the picture and then made my own version of it.  When it came to making the tree itself I used 1/2yd of green felt, folded it in half vertically and freehanded what I thought looked like a pretty good tree shape.

I laid out all the ornaments on the tree to figure out where to sew the buttons that would be used to hang the ornaments later on, then I hand sewed each green button to the tree.

Each of the ornament pockets were made with red felt and were 3x3inch squares.  I hand sewed the numbers onto the front.

The entire project was completely hand sewn using a blanket stitch around the tree and trunk and each of the pockets.  One thing I didn't really think about when making this calendar was the size it was going to turn out into.  My calendar ended up being about 5ft tall.  I think my ornaments were a tad larger than other blogs I looked at and that required my tree and pockets to be larger as well.  Regardless I think it turned out really nice and I'm so glad it's finished because it was definitely a small labor of love.

 

I went ahead and made some patterns for those of you out there who work better with them than going freehanded.  I'd love to be able to say I have a pdf of them but I'm not that computer savy.

 

 

 

If you notice there are patterns for 3 ornaments I ended up not using, the bird, the round bird, and the skate.  I left them on the pattern pages because I thought maybe someone else might need them but I had forgotten I made 3 ornament balls with mine, Grant's, and Derrick's name on them so I didn't have room for the other 3.

 

Happy Advent Sewing!