Christmas in July: Felt Advent Calendar

It's Christmas in July! All week on Wayward Girls' Crafts, we'll be blogging Christmas crafts. And next week, a very special week of craftiness!

Every year, our family uses a felt Advent calendar (you know, a calendar to count the days until Christmas). My mom's calendar is gorgeous, with details in gold thread and beautiful beads and sequins, including some shaped like holly leaves, snowflakes and more. When I made mine, however, I couldn't find the fancy sequins anywhere :( . It just wasn't the same, so I went for a different form of decoration in my calendar.

Materials:

• Felt
• Scissors
• Glitter fabric paint
• Tacky glue
• Thread
• 25 hooks and 26 eyes
• (Possibly: sewing machine or needle)

In this set of ornaments, I'm missing my reindeer and sleigh. The second row of ornaments are symbols of Christ (and technically, the candle belongs there).

I combined elements of my husband's family's felt Advent calendar, too: they have a Nativity scene among their ornaments, and I loved that sentiment. The Nativity characters are along the bottom row (the first one is an angel, but the silver and iridescent sparkles don't show up well here).

I tried to make sure that each ornament had some bling on it somewhere with glitter fabric paint. I glued the various piece of felt together with tacky glue. Here's a closeup of one of the pieces:

The background is a Christmas tree on red felt, with rows of pockets at the bottom for the ornaments. I couldn't find mine (I hope it's somewhere with the reindeer and sleigh!), but here's the idea:

Each day of December, you add another ornament to the tree using the hooks and eyes. We kept the last ornament, for Christmas Day, (we used the star; my husband's family used the baby Jesus) on an extra hook on the back of the calendar. We loved the calendar so much that we always fought over who got to put up the ornaments--but now that most of us don't live at home, sometimes Mom doesn't even put up the calendar until the week before Christmas!

My favorite ornaments, aside from the characters, are the snowflake and snowman. Which are your favorites? What would you put on your tree?