While 2026 looks like it’s going to be as crazy as 2025, I have at least one good thing to say about January: I finished my project of the month! This is especially surprising as the Advent calendar I started in 2020 was a long way from done.
Every December, my nephew and I open our Advent calendars together. He always has the latest Lego calendar, while I have been using the same Harry Potter one for years now. When my sister mentioned that she almost bought me a new calendar, I realized I did want a change. I put a reminder on my phone for November to buy one before I remembered the one I was making. If I could get it finished, I would have a new calendar for this December and I wouldn’t have to buy anything!*
So I chose to work on the Advent calendar in January. I had 16 of the 25 ornaments made and an idea of the quilt that would display them, but that was all. My first step was to make more ornaments.
Then I worked on the quilt and the bags. I actually did some tests because the range of ornament sizes required a range of bag sizes. I could have made identical bags, all big enough for the biggest ornament, but then the quilt would have been huge. Instead, I sorted the ornaments and made bags in batches. I wound up using two different styles in the end.
I made the quilt after the bags were done to help me figure out the exact size to make the quilt. It’s one of the simplest I’ve ever made. There was so much going on with the ornaments and the bags to hold them that the background could be quite plain.
I hand-sewed snaps and buttons to the bags, then the bags to the quilt. I also had to sew buttons onto the tree and loops onto the back of the ornaments. I used a piece of practice quilt from another project to see how the ornaments would hang.
Overall, this project went very smoothly. I think my biggest mistake was laying out the ornaments to figure out the button placement and not taking a photo. I thought that the layout would be easy to replicate. But when I went to hang the ornaments for the final photos, I couldn’t get a pleasing distribution. Maybe I’m misremembering how it looked before, but I could have sworn I had even coverage. So it’s a little wonkier than I intended.
Alas, I do not love all the ornaments. Some are merely okay. But the cool thing about this project is that I can replace the ornaments at any time and transfer the rejects to our real tree. For now, it is done. I will have a new Advent calendar hanging in our front hall come December.
I wasn’t sure I could finish this project in a month because there were so much to do, but it was done on January 30th. The calendar is hanging in a closet, wrapped in plastic to keep it from getting dusty, and I’ve changed my November reminder to “hang Advent calendar.”
I’m loving my project-of-the-month plan. I’m really happy to have this five-year-old project finished.
*The only things I bought to finish this project were more snaps, the paper tags, and a couple of pieces of Christmas-themed fabric. I got all of these things secondhand at our local craft supply thrift store.
