Saturday, December 3, 2011

The Pinterest inspired peg advent calander....

So last week on my Pinterest picks of the week I posted this little gem
This week I decided to start making my own version.  I already had two planks of wood in the garage and a huge pack of wooden pegs that have been floating around for years doing nothing so it was time to make some advent calenders.









 I am so happy with the finished products.  The best part of these is that I only had to purchase a few small and cheap things to get them made.  The whole project was time consuming there is no denying and it took a few days to get all the components done but what a finished project.

The wooden planks were spray painted white using an aerosol can of undercoat white, I am not into gloss finishes and unfortunately all hardware and auto stores near me only seem to sell gloss so undercoat it was.

I had painted the pegs using acrylic paint from the cheapy store, they are a mixture of Chromacryl, Jo Sonja and Kaisercraft.

The paper on the front of the pegs is a mixture of new and old scrapbook paper, I only purchased four sheets coming well in at under $10 and attached using double sided scrapbooking tape.

The string was some kind of crochet stuff (I don't crochet and have no idea what the actual name is) bought from the cheapy store for $1.  I dyed the string buy rolling it onto spare pegs and dipping it in a mixture of regular food dye and water in a coffee mug for 24 hours, I did not rinse just squeezed the excess and left it in the sun to dry for a day, I love the imperfect colour effect that it has, almost like tie dye string.

The pegs were attached to the board using a hot glue gun ( the hot hot type, not the cool one), you could possibly use some kind of heavy duty glue but the gunis something I already own.
I did number all the little parcels using my cricut and some glue, next time I will be using a xyron adhesive runner to make the cut out numbers like stickers or I might just buy pre made number stickers, in actual fact the wrapping of the little parcels, the tying of the string and cutting and adhering the numbers was the most time consuming aspect of this project.
I attached the calenders to the wall using these Command velcro strips, we are about to move so don't want more stuff on the wall and these will only be up for 24 days of the year.  Why bother drilling holes and attaching hooks to the back of the calenders when two of the largest sized strips holds the whole thing up mess and fuss free.

At the end of the day I am more than 100% happy with the finished project, it took a lot of time but it was something that I could do in little bits a little at a time over a few days.  The kids LOVE them and the best thing is I can change the paper for a new look if  I want, I can reuse the calender every year from now on in and I have just created a Christmas memory for my kids and that is the most important thing to me.

No comments: