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Create your own Advent calendar with this quick and easy tutorial. A great Christmas craft project for anyone that wants to enjoy counting down to Christmas, but wants to limit their sugar intake and avoid the usual chocolate Advent calendars! This Advent calendar is 100% sugar free, instead it is activities based, making it a great option for anyone that enjoys doing festive activities in the lead up to Christmas. It’s also great for couples, teams, and families to plan things to do together in the lead up to Christmas day. If you’re using this tutorial to create a calendar for your young family, it’s a great project for kids to get involved it. Apart from anything including scissors or sharp craft blades, kids can get stuck in decorating their Advent calendar and coming up with fun ideas to write on each paper strip.
It’s so easy to get creative with this tutorial, creating a paper chain to suit your home decor or to go with your Christmas decor theme. You can choose to go traditional with green and red paper, minimalist with neutrals, or go tropical like me with fun bright colours to bring some vibrancy to your home! All you need to do is find some paper or card in colours to match your theme, you might be able to find some already in your home or purchase some fun paper and card from a store. Some of my recommendations include Cowling & Wilcox, Cass Art, G.F Smith or London Graphic Centre.
Your finished paper chain can hang in your home in your living room near your Christmas tree, or at your desk so you remember to check your calendar each day to find your festive activity for the day! I advise making a few extra paper chains in addition to your Advent calendar to really create a feature piece to add to your regular decor.
This tutorial is simple and easy to follow. All you need is some coloured paper, scissors, pens & an adhesive or stapler. Create a vibrant paper chain with 25 rings, one for each day from the 1st December right up to Christmas day. Before curling up and sticking each paper strip into a ring, write a Christmas activity, idea or uplifting quote on each strip to create a fun-filled Advent calendar. Each day when you cut off one ring, you can read what is written on that strip to do that day!
Here are some ideas for what you can write on your Advent calendar strips:
- Bake Christmas cookies
- Go to see local Christmas lights
- Have a hot chocolate
- Go for a winter walk
- Watch a Christmas movie
- Donate to your favourite charity
- Christmas karaoke
- Build a gingerbread house
- Make a Christmas playlist
- Have a pyjama day
- Order from your favourite restaurant
- Have a game night
WHAT YOU WILL NEED:
- Coloured paper or card
- Scissors or paper cutter
- Ruler
- Pens
- Glue stick, double sided tape or stapler
- Any other decorative embellishments (optional)
STEPS:
Step 1 - Cut your paper into strips with your desired length and width. This completely depends on how big you want the loops to be for your paper chain, you can get creative with this making really big or small loops. To keep it simple, I used the shortest side of my A4 paper as the length and cut each strip with a 2.5cm width.
Step 2 - Take 24 of your cut strips and on each one write one festive activity or idea on one side. See above for some ideas.
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Step 3 - If desired, you can decorate the other side of each strip with drawings, embellishments or patterns - although this step is completely optional.
Step 4 - Once you’ve finished creating each strip, it’s now time to create the chains. You can choose to attach each strip together in a particular order, or attach them randomly so you don’t know which activity that you’ll get each day. Take the first strip and curl it into a ring shape, overlapping the ends by a centimetre or two. Next, either carefully staple the ends together or stick them together using a glue stick or double-sided tape.
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Step 5 - Run the next strip through the middle of the first ring and then curl it into another ring shape as you did the first one. Staple or stick together using your preferred method.
Step 6 - Continue attaching each strip to the chain repeating step 5 until you have a completed paper chain!
Once you’ve completed your paper chain Advent calendar, you can hang it up in your home. On December 1st, cut the first ring off to find out what your first festive activity is. Remember to cut off a ring each day throughout Advent until Christmas Day 🎄
If you do make this paper chain Advent calendar, be sure to snap a photo and share it with me on Instagram or email them to me via hello@tiharasmith.com. I can’t wait to see your creative Advent calendars! I’ll also be counting down to Christmas over on my Instagram with a special project that I’ve been working on for a while. Follow me over on Instagram and check my feed on the 1st December to find out more…