I don’t know how 2019 has slipped away so quickly, but I’m happy to say that my Advent calendars were finished on time, shipped, and received before December 1!
I made one for each of my boy’s families. I made a set of cards with simple ideas to do each day and for the days that had something more unusual (like “feed the birds”) I included some bird seed.
I hope these will start new traditions with their families. 😍
The panels are not difficult to make. They have the instructions printed at the top and feature clearly marked cutting and ironing lines. Ironing the tiny pleats was probably the hardest part of the whole project.
Here’s the order that I did things. . .
- I cut and ironed the strips of houses and topstitched the upper hem so that they wouldn’t unfold.
- I ironed the teeny-tiny pleats and stitched the strips onto the background.
- I sandwiched the top with a layer of 80/20 batting and the backing fabric and did some free-motion quilting in the areas not affected by the pockets.
- NOTE- some people have reversed the two previous steps and quilted the whole project before adding the pleated strips. That might work better. . . I’ll try it if I ever make them again!
- I bound the edges and added button holes in the top corners so they could be hung with Command hooks.
