One of our favourite things at Christmas time is advent calendars. That morning excitement and running to get your treat out for the day! It has become a tradition as well as a way for our small kids to learn to recognise numbers. It also builds excitement in the countdown to Christmas. The problem with store bought advent calendars is that they are usually made from plastic (on the inside) which is not easily recyclable, as well as wrapped in plastic when you buy them. So, this year I decided we will not go with store bought advent calendars. When looking at reusable advent calendars online, I really liked the look of the wooden drawer style but storage of one for each child between Christmases would be annoying as they do take up more space. There were so many styles of material ones which looked easy to fold but in some cases the pockets were tiny, and I found most of them very expensive. That led me to YouTube, which has a lot of DIY calendars. I could not find any that had measurements and detailed guidelines. In this post I will share detailed instructions (with my measurements) and photos.
My design is four rows of six pockets each, making the 24 pockets of the advent calendar. Depending on the amount of material you have available and what look you want, you can really adjust this design to suit you. You can do more rows and either have a very long one or cut it into a Christmas tree shape for example. I went for a conservative design using the maximum amount of the material I had available (to minimise wastage) as well as the easiest design to sew. I wanted a larger pocket size with a panel at the top for the kid’s names. I used two colours so that my kids could easily tell which was their own advent calendar.