Blogging has been lighter than usual recently because I have been busy working on an advent calendar. I finished it in the nick of time, half an hour before midnight yesterday.

Advent calendars / Christmas calendars are very common in Sweden and there are all kinds. In stores you can buy cardboard calendars with a Christmas-themed picture behind each flap, or chocolate-filled ones. There are also advent calendars on TV as well as radio, basically Christmas-themed series with one episode aired every day from December 1st to 24th. There are also tie-in cardboard calendars for those, where the picture behind the day’s flap ties in with the current episode. On top of that, many families with kids have calendars with small gifts.

I was thinking of making an advent calendar already last year but with Adrian’s birth there was no time. I’d even browsed for inspiration and decided roughly on the kind of calendar to make: with pockets, in wool felt, with appliqued and/or embroidered Christmas motifs on each pocket – something like this one on Etsy, but with a starker, more pared-down look like this one on Purl Bee. This year I was determined to make one.

It took quite a bit longer than I’d planned because of unexpected complications. Firstly, I had planned to glue on most of the decorations, and did so with the first few decorations. Then I decided to be efficient do all the cutting and embroidering first, and save the glueing until the end. But when I went back to those first pockets, their decorations were falling off, even though I’d chosen a fabric glue that was supposed to work on wool felt! So instead of glueing I decided I’d stitch the pictures onto the pockets. Which actually turned out very good: the stitching gave each motif just a bit of depth, so it doesn’t look as flat as it would do with glueing.

But now there was so much stitching on each pocket (not only the appliques but the numbers as well) and especially with many long stitches on the back of each pocket, that I had to iron on interfacing to each pocket to protect the stitches. Otherwise they’d get damaged as soon as we put stuff in the pockets. That in turn meant that I had to edge the top of each pocket with blanket stitch, to make sure the interfacing doesn’t come loose from the felt of the pocket itself. More extra stitching!

Now, time to assemble the whole thing, and sew the pockets to the sheet of felt. I had vaguely imagined that I’d do this by machine, just like the Purl Bee calendar. But now that everything else was hand-stitched, machine sewing would look out of place and drag down the overall impression. Besides, when I took out the sheet of felt, I realized it was so thick and stiff that there was no way it would fit under my sewing machine. Yet more stitching!

All the steps up to this one had been fun and challenging in a good way. But this last bit was quite tedious and physically hard work – the background was 3mm dense wool felt and the pockets 1mm, so just pushing the needle through was difficult. And the pockets kept skewing and slipping, so I had to keep measuring and aligning them all the time. (Even so, they ended up a bit wonky here and there.) Halfway through my fingertips were really sore and I thought I’d get blisters. But I counted the days until the end of the month and decided to work a bit slower, leaving myself a narrower margin but sparing my fingers, so I ended up with slight calluses instead of blisters. Much better. Plus, about halfway through I also worked out a better method for aligning the pockets, so there was less fiddling with rulers and stuff, and the work progressed better.

I’m really pleased with the end result. So was Ingrid.

The materials I used were 3mm white wool felt from Handmade Presents, wool felt sheets in various colours from Myriad Online, and small bits of mixed fibre craft felt from my stash (for the faces of St. Lucia and Santa Claus – I was too stingy to order a full sheet when I only needed a few tiny pieces), and DMC 6-strand embroidery yarn.

I chose mostly secular imagery. Christmas for me is more of a midwinter celebration than a religious holiday. The actual designs I mostly drew with inspiration from Google Images… I’m not much of an artist so I went for a stylized, simple look. It’s mostly applique with a little bit of decorative stitching, but some pockets have embroidery only.

PS: Bonus points if you recognize the song on pocket #11!