The Countdown

So Bruce and I decided to make a new advent calendar for Christmas this year.

I have a countdown from before we were married, but it can often be frustrating since it involves constantly moving and removing, rotating and fiddling with the various numbers.  This new one would be considerably easier, and far cuter than our old one.

We started thinking about this project back in early-November, but neither one of us really started making any headway on it until recently.

We purchased our little boxes first.  I knew Michael's had exactly what I wanted, and we had a coupon!  I already had a ton of Christmas-themed paper, so we were covered in that department.  Our frame came from Target.  I removed the back and the plastic face on it so that our boxes could sit inside the frame.

I found a big sheet of magnetic sheet metal at Lowe's, and had it cut to the size I wanted by a company here in Idaho Falls.  This was the most time consuming part of everything, just waiting for the metal to be cut (after finding someone to cut it, that is...that took a while too).

Bruce and I laid out a couple ideas for the background of our countdown, and settled on what you see in the pictures.  I mod-podged our paper choices onto our sheet metal and let it all dry for a couple hours.  Meanwhile, I cut out paper to fit on the inside of our tins and their lids.  I used a blue paper with little white snowflakes for the inside of the tins, and then alternated between red, green, and cream to put behind the numbers that show through the lids (I did do all the numbers by hand, but if anyone else does this, I would recommend printing them).

I bought some metal-bonding glue at Lowe's, and attached the sheet metal to the back of our picture frame and allowed it to sit overnight.  Then we attached a frame hanger, glued magnets to the back of our tins, and hung it up!

I am so happy with how it turned out!