Project: Christmas Advent Calendar

My sister Lindsey came to visit in September with her boys.  Whenever we get together we like to do some sort of project.  We have made baby calendars, stocking hangars and other stuff.  This time, she wanted to make a Christmas advent calendar and I thought it would be fun.  We decided to make a nativity calendar where you put up a different character in the nativity each day of December until Christmas.  We ordered a cricut cartridge "a quilted christmas" to cut out all of the characters and got to work.  We were able to cut out and glue together each of the characters while Lindsey was here and it was quite a bit of work, especially when you can only do it when all the kids are asleep--naptime and after they went to bed. 
I made some pockets out of red and sized them so I could fit 6 different characters on each of 4 rows.  I cut numbers out using my cricut and added them to the pockets for each of the days of December.  I had the pockets and a 12x12 background sheet laminated. 

Lindsey and I had a hard time coming up with how to actually put this together and she suggested sewing.  It worked really well.  I just did it on my machine and sewed the strips on and then separated each of the pockets with sewing. 

One of my friends helped me laminate the characters (Thanks Amy!).  Some were kind of hard because they had so many layers, but it ended up fine.  We chose to use magnets to hold the pieces up. We also talked about velcro, but then you have to put them in the same places each time. I picked up a couple of ugly frames at Big Lots and we spray pained them black. My mother-in-law was able to cut some metal sheets to fit in the frames. We painted these a tan color, like the desert. Lindsey and I found some adhesive magnet strips at Walmart and they were so easy to stick onto our characters. Now I just have to wait a few more days to put it on my wall and start building!

All the pieces stuck in their pockets

The whole thing put together
We used thumb tacks on the frame for the stars, trees and angel.

Shepherds up close

Wisemen

Stable and manger