Baby sock advent calendar

Welcome to December! I can feel like 'officially' starting to celebrate the Christmas season. I felt a little guilty visiting Santa last Friday when it was still only November but sometimes with young kids you have to 'make hay while the sun shines' and take advantage of these moments.

As usual, I had grand plans to make a lovely Advent calendar that could be brought out every year and passed down to the children and as usual, I've run out of time. I'm not sure what made me think of it but I decided to use what baby socks I'd kept of the kids to make an Advent calendar. I was a few short so picked up a couple more from op shops. Even last night when it was finally being assembled, a sock went missing. Now, why does that sound so familiar?

I used an old framed teddy bear print to mount the socks.

It must've been my lucky day because I found a Santa sack at my local thrift store for 50 cents which fit the frame perfectly. I inserted the frame's backing board into the sack and left the opening to the rear of the frame which I've stored the 'larger' surprises, ie DVD's and colouring books.

I spotted these really cute Santa pegs from the dollar store, $2 for 12. I had wooden pegs I was going to spray paint gold but this was a bit of a time saver for me at a time which has been pretty hectic.

I used the gold thread that came with the Santa pegs to hang the socks from. It was threaded through the little clips on the reverse side of the frame which keep the backing board in place.

This is the reverse side of the frame.

I printed the numbers 1 through 24 and coloured them in a gold texta, which were cut out and put on each sock. I chose things that coincided with things we were doing over the next 24 days like when we go on holiday next Wednesday, we'll probably watch a Christmas DVD or play a board game. On the days we're home, we'll make some Christmas cookies, make pipe cleaner reindeers or go to the library.

I only bought one bag of Santa chocolates so some days there aren't any chocolates but a little surprise like a Christmas stamp or a few Christmas stickers.

I repurposed an old Merry Christmas sign to put on the top. The whole thing cost me next to nothing (except $20 for the purchase of 2 new Christmas DVDs and $4 for 2 Christmas colouring books plus the other few dollars for the Santa pegs and Santa sack). The most time consuming part was working out what and where we would be on those particular days.

Note the blue Wiggles sock. It was a replacement for the missing sock. You wait. The missing sock will show up on the 26th of December!