DIY: Magnetic Advent Calendar

I love advent calendars! There are so many varieties from paper to ceramic to choose from! I remember my children filling in Santa’s beard with cotton balls to count down the days. And I remember making the green and red paper chains and ripping one chain off as each day passed. As I was reminiscing about it all, I realized I could make one using my digital scrapbook supplies in no time at all! Supplies: Holiday Themed Digital Scrapbooking Collections Printable Magnet Sheets Printer Scissors Cookie Sheet, refrigerator or other metal surface Let’s get started! Open your scrapping software and create a new letter sized document at 300 dpi and transparent background. Next, look through your digital scrapbooking supplies for a Christmas tree. I’m using one from Brandy Murry’s Holiday In Lights Collection Biggie. I enlarged the tree image to fit the document and added a star for the top of my tree. Other options could be an angel or ornament of some kind. I made sure to save my document as a layered file and jpeg and then closed it.

Time for the embellishments! Open another letter sized document in your software. Chose 24 or 25 holiday related embellishments and drag them onto your document. The amount depends on which day you are counting down to. Resize the embellishments so that they will fit on your tree and leave room around each one for cutting them out.

After I had my embellishments chosen and resized, I added a number to each one from 1 to 24 or 25 for each day of the month.

Save your document as a layered file and jpeg image. And get ready to print! I’m using Magnet Sheets from Avery. They are designed for ink jet printers and they recommend loading one sheet at a time into your printer. I used the “photo paper matte” setting on my printer and printed a copy of my tree document and embellishments document.

Once printed and the ink has dried, grab your scissors and cut the tree from the background paper. Then cut each embellishment out. You can fussy cut each one but I am too impatient and cut each one with a white border.

Finally, add your tree to a metal surface, such as a cookie sheet or your refrigerator! Then on December 1st, you can add the first embellishment to the tree. When you add the last one, it will be Christmas Eve or Christmas Morning! Now you have a special, one of a kind advent calendar you made yourself! It took me no time at all to create this fun, holiday themed project that I can enjoy each and every day until December 25th! I hope you give this project a try. We’d love to see you post in the Scrap Girls Hybrid Gallery. Have fun!