I decided to do advent bags this year. I used fabric I had on hand. You may remember it from this post about recovering the stool. I wanted it to be a little more neutral and not stand out so much against the other Christmas Decor.
Here are my pretty advent bags hung at the fire place.
I stink for not taking pictures of cutting my fabric, but really I just eye-balled it. I wanted them fairly small because we planned on just putting paper/cardstock in it not actual items. I took my fabric and folded it up with raw edges touching at top and sides, but fold at bottom. Then I counted out how many bags I felt I could get out of that one strip. I got 12, and just made little cuts with my scissors just at the bottom fold to mark it. Then I "tore" it with my hands up to "cut" out the sizes. I then did the same thing for another stretch of fabric to give me 24 bags.
Then I took them upstairs and had paired them up inside out and sewed up the side seams.
I used a stencil set that I already had from Michael's that has a sticky back to add my numbers to the bottom right of the bags. I tried my Staz On ink pad and a sponge and it didn't work so well. I also tried a red marker and didn't like how it looked, so just grabbed a black sharpie.
And this is how my black sharpie and stencil turned out on the bag. I like it!
I then planned to use this "thread" (don't remember what its called but we have a ton of it thanks to my Mimi) and these plastic needles to hand sew drawstrings on the bags to just do a basic cinch. But I didn't like how it looked and needed to get them up, so I didn't do anything to cinch them. Just took safety pins- because I also had a ton of them (thanks to hubby for the suggestion). and pinned the bags in order to the ribbon I already had hanging from the baby boy's birthday party (his pictures had hung from it).
That was it, really simple. It's been fun to do. I sat down with a calendar and a list of activities we wanted to do and just wrote them out on pieces of paper based on what the day of the week was and if we already had something planned to do that day, used it as our activity. Mostly trying to do things at home as a family- like a craft, or baking, or watching a movie, etc.
