Advent Calendar From Dry Food Containers

It might have been easier to purchase an advent calendar with chocolates from the drug store but I'm really happy I decided to make my own this year.  It was very time consuming but definitely worth it!

I used empty dry food containers for the dividers.

Very carefully cut each container until you have 25 circles.  I'm sure you could quickly do this step with a saw but a kitchen knife or hardware scissors will also do the trick.

I ran out of circular food containers so I had to use a few rectangles from cereal and cracker boxes.

Next I painted the circles.  You could cover them in paper or fabric instead.  The cardboard required several coats of paint.

While the paint was drying I worked on the gifts and tags. 

Our gift closet had plenty of stocking stuffers that were small enough for the calendar.

I wrapped each gift in matching paper and used tulle to attach the number tags.

A large piece of cardboard worked well for the base to the calendar.  I glued two felt pieces to the back to attach a tulle hanger.

The cardboard piece wasn't very pretty so I covered it in the same wrapper paper I used for the small gifts.

It took a few tries to get all the circles laid out on the cardboard backing with out going over the edges.  Once I had them all in place I used my glue gun to attach them to each other and the back.   

Luckily all the gifts fit into the small circles.

The advent calendar is now hung by our tree.  My daughter is so excited each morning to wake up and open a small gift!

I'm linking this post here.